The Shield of Time

Seset hugged herself, rocked to and fro, wept aloud. Tseshu sat moveless, excépt for taking her man’s good hand in hers.

“Say no more now,” Aryuk ordered. “I am weary. I need a night’s rest.”

He and Tseshu sought their hut. Lying beside her, he found he could sleep—lightly, skimming above pain, dreams flickering like bits of rainbow. I have lived longer than many, he thought once, half wakeful. It must be time for me to go find our children who died. They have been lonely.

At dawn he ate again, let her clothe him, and went out. The ravine reached shadowy, its alders hunched into their own dreams. A few stars still glimmered overhead. Breath smoked into the chill. From the sea rumbled sounds of waves and of ice grinding ice. His wound throbbed, hot, but if he moved with care the pain seldom bit too hard.

His woman, son, and first son’s woman gathered about him. He pointed at the corpse. “Bring this inside and close the entrance before you leave,” he told them. “The Mammoth Slayers may feel milder if gulls and foxes have not eaten of their friend. But first—” He tried to stoop. His wound forbade. “Dzuryan, you are the man now, until your brothers come home. Dig those eyeballs out. If I carry them away, his ghost should follow me and leave you alone.” The youth hung back, lips fluttering in the twilit blur of his face. “Do it!”

When the things rested safe in his pouch, Aryuk, one-armed, drew Tseshu to him. “Had I grown old and feeble, I must go into the wilderness,” he said. “I leave a little sooner, only a little sooner.”

From Dzuryan he took a hand ax. He wasn’t sure why. He had refused a food ration, and was in no shape to knock down an animal or even make a trap. Well, the stone was something to hold. He nodded, turned, and trudged off, toward the easiest path up the slope and out of sight.

Surely you never wanted this for me, You Who Know Strangeness, he thought. When you learn of it, will you come help? Better if you help my children and grandchildren. I do not matter anymore. He sent the memory of her elsewhere and gave himself to his wandering.

VII

Throughout winter, the Tulat were as little active as possible, to conserve energy for survival. They collected what food they were able to; by daylight they did what work came to hand; but mainly they stayed in their dens, and for most of that time they slept or sat in a self-induced, daydreamy trance. It was no wonder that so many, especially infants, took fatally sick. Yet what choice had they?

The Paleo-Indians were different, busy the year round, even during the long nights. They had the skills and the means to keep themselves well fed in all seasons. While some animals, such as the caribou, migrated, others, such as the mammoth, did not. That was the reason they settled on the steppe, though their hunters ranged into the northern highlands and the southern woods. Only the sea daunted them. Their descendants would master it. Meanwhile these, the Cloud People, had the Tulat to glean along its shores for them.

Thus Ralph Corwin grew accustomed to movement and noise after dark. An optical pickup secretly planted in the till enabled him to watch on a screen in his dome, magnifying the view at will. If things got interesting, or if he simply felt like it, he would stroll over and mingle. The folk had long since accepted him as human—enigmatic, potentially dangerous, but fascinating and, it seemed, well-disposed. You could enjoy his company, the mystery adding salt to the pleasure. Girls smiled, and some were quite pretty. Too bad that taking advantage would mean a degree of involvement compromising his mission. The Tulat were easygoing but … grubby; nor had he time to spare for them. The Patrol didn’t want its too few agents spending more lifespan than necessary on any single job.

How grand it would be if Wanda Tamberly, who otherwise fitted what he’d heard about outdoorsy California girls of the later twentieth century, were forthcoming. No matter, he often scolded himself.

On this night he forgot about her. Tumult was rising in the village. He dressed warmly and left.

The air lay still, as if wind had congealed in the cold. Passing through his nostrils, it felt liquid. A moon just past the full made his breath a phantom akin to the hills north and south. Snow glistened and crunched underfoot. He had no need of a flashlight, nor did torches flare among the houses ahead. It was an extravagance the Wanayimo could have afforded, thanks to their tributaries. A fire was being built at the cairn of the skulls. Folk milled about, talking, gesticulating, sometimes howling. When the flames were high, they would bring drums and dance.

It would be a dance of mourning and propitiation, Corwin judged. That meant leadership, which meant certain plans and preparations. He steered wide of the crowd and made his way to the home of Red Wolf’s extended family.

His guess proved right. The hingeless door leaned loose between the tusks and light trickled around it. He put his face to the crack. “Aho,” he called softly. “Tall Man speaks. May he enter?” Ordinarily that would have been an affront, implying that those inside were not hospitable, but rules changed when demonic forces were abroad, and Corwin also had an idea that Answerer was on hand. Unease had waxed these past few days, after the shaman sequestered himself; and now this abrupt excitement—

After a minute, a form within blocked off the light. “Be welcome,” said Red Wolf, and drew the barrier aside. Corwin stepped through. Red Wolf accompanied him back to the middle of the room, where the banked coals had been stoked up. That small, smoking blaze gave about as much illumination as the fat that burned in four soapstone lamps. Beyond hulked darkness. Corwin could barely see a screen, hide stretched over a driftwood frame, propped across the rear end. Behind it must be such of the family as had no business here tonight and were not out among the howlers.

Those who had met were a chosen few. Corwin recognized the hunters Broken Blade and Spearpoint, the respected elder Fireflint, standing. On the floor, arms across drawn-up knees, sat Answerer. Shadows lay doubly deep in the furrows of his visage, the sockets of sunken eyes. His back and neck were bent. Utter exhaustion, Corwin realized. He’s been away, but I don’t think it was on any spirit journey.

“Yes, best is that Tall Man be in our council,” said Red Wolf. His tone was steely. “Did you summon him, Answerer?”

The shaman made a noncommittal noise.

“I saw what appears to be trouble, and came to see if I might be of use,” Corwin told them, not insincerely.

’Trouble indeed,” said Red Wolf. “Now Running Fox is dead, the cleverest of men.”

“Ill is this.” Corwin had found that man valuable—quick on the uptake, talented at explaining things—though apt to ask disconcerting questions. His shrewdness and independence of mind were a distinct loss to the tribe. “How did it happen?” Some extraordinary way, obviously.

Gazes through the gloom ransacked the outsider. “The Vole man Aryuk slew him,” Red Wolf replied. “That Aryuk for whose sake Sun Hair gave up her knife.”

“What? No, can’t be!” They’re cowed, the Tulat, they’ve had it stabbed into them that they’re helpless.

“It is so, Tall Man. Answerer has just arrived with the news. He escaped by a gnat’s wing, he, whose person should be inviolable.”

“But—” Corwin drew his lungs full of warm, odorous, sooty air. Stay calm. Stay alert. This situation could get nasty fast, “I am surprised. I am grieved. I ask that you tell me how the woe came about.”

Answerer looked up. Flame glinted in his eyes. Malignancy hissed: “It was because of you and your woman. Running Fox and I went to find out why those Voles are so dear to you.”

“Friends, only friends. Sun Hair’s from earlier years. Not mine. I hardly know them.”

“Aryuk said the same.”

“It was true!”

“Aryuk may have cast a spell on her,” Fireflint ventured.

“Answerer needed to find out,” Red Wolf said. “Running Fox went with him. They spoke for a while, then suddenly Aryuk attacked. He took Running Fox off guard and killed him with a blow of a hand ax. Somebody threw another at Answerer, who fled.”

No wonder he’s done in, Corwin thought distantly, an old man—perhaps as old as fifty—going day and night over the snow in terror for his life. The shaman had slumped again. “But what could make Aryuk do this?”

“It is not clear,” Red Wolf replied. “A demon may have seized him, or the evil may long have nested in his heart…. You truly have no knowledge?”

“None. What will you do now?”

Glance met glance. The silence grew until Red Wolf reached a decision. He’s still leery of me, Corwin knew, but he wants to believe Wanda and I are honest. He wants to show his own goodwill by being candid.

“I will not dance for Running Fox tonight,” Red Wolf said. “With certain hunters I will be bound for the sea. We must bring our friend home.”

“Yes, you must,” Corwin understood.

It was more than sentiment: “We need him here. His is a strong ghost, like Snowstrider’s, to aid us against evil spirits and hostile ghosts.”

“Hostile…. Tulat?”

“Who else? Although I will see to it that Aryuk’s body lies afar with his ghost tightly bound to it. Answerer will give me the tools and words for that.”

“Do you mean to kill him?”

Surprise murmured through the crackling of the flames. “What else?” Red Wolf demanded. “We cannot let a Vole man harm a man of the people and go unscathed.”

“We should kill many of them,” Broken Blade growled.

“No, no,” said Red Wolf. “Then how can they bring tribute? They must be quelled, but I think it will be enough to slay Aryuk.”

“What if we fail in that?”

“Then, true, we must avenge Running Fox on others. Let us see what happens.”

“I wish you would stay your hands,” Corwin exclaimed. Immediately he knew what foolishness that was. He’d been thinking how Wanda would feel when she got back from the field.

The faces before him hardened. Answerer looked up again and croaked almost gleefully, “Then you do favor the Vole People! What is between you and them? That is what Running Fox and I went to learn, and he died.”

“Nothing,” Corwin said. “You went there for nothing. It is truth what Sun Hair and I have told you; we are only sojourners here, and in a while we shall leave forever. We only want friendship with … with everybody.”

“You, maybe. But she?”

“I vouch for her.” Corwin saw he’d better put up a brave front. He roughened his tone. “Hear me. Think. If we had ill intentions toward the Cloud People, need we hide it? You have seen a little of what we can do. A little.”

Red Wolf moved his hands, a calming gesture. “Well spoken,” he said quietly. “Yet I think it best if you, Tall Man, make sure that your wife Sun Hair keeps apart from this matter.”

“I will,” Corwin promised. “Oh, I will. She must not act. Such is the law of our tribe.”

VIII

Young hunters could travel swiftly. With brief stops for rest and a bite of dried meat, Red Wolf and his three companions reached Alder River the night after they left home. The moon was up, its fullness gnawed by the Dark Hare but still casting shimmer and shadow across clouds, snow, ice. The three huts crouched misshapen. Red Wolf breathed deeply and took a magic bone between his teeth before he could make himself crawl into the one whose entrance had been blocked. Inside, sightless, he laid hand on something that felt colder than the air. No stranger to death, he nonetheless jerked the hand back.

Mastering terror, he tried once more. Yes, a face lay stiff beneath his palm. “Running Fox, this is Red Wolf come to give you your honor,” he muttered around the bone. Getting hold of the coat, he dragged the dead man forth.

Moonlight grayed skin. Running Fox was frozen as hard as river or sea. Blood clotted black on the left temple and around the chin. Black too were the gaping mouth and the horrible twin emptinesses above.

The hunters squatted around. “They gouged his eyes out,” whispered Broken Blade. “Why?”

“To blind his ghost, lest it pursue them?” wondered Spearpoint.

“Their ghosts will suffer worse,” snarled White Water.

“Enough,” said Red Wolf. “These are unlucky things to speak of, worst by dark. We shall know more in the morning. Now let us take him from this ill place, that he may sleep among his comrades.”

They carried the body above the ravine, put it into the bag they had brought along for it, and spread their own. Wind whittered. The moon flew between clouds. Wolf-howls afar were homelike when men heard, as well, the mumbling of the sea beyond the ice. Red Wolf drowsed off, but his dreams were jagged.

At dawn his band cast about. The tracks they found in the snow, though days old, told a tale they understood. “Some have gone east, some west,” Red Wolf related. “Small footprints are in both sets. Those are surely Aryuk’s kin, seeking refuge till our wrath has been slaked. One trail goes inland, and is a grown man’s. That is Aryuk’s.”

“Or somebody else’s, like a son’s?” asked Spearpoint. “They are sly beasts, those.”

Red Wolf signed a no. “Why should a son mislead us, when we would hunt the father down too? If they meant to protect him, they would have gone at his side, ready for a fight. But they knew they would lose. Best that he die alone for what he did.” With a grin: “We will do as they wish.”

“If he dies before we catch him, Running Fox is cheated of revenge,” Broken Blade fretted.

“Then he shall have it tenfold on the other Voles,” White Water vowed.

Red Wolf scowled. Punishment was one thing, no different from slaying a dangerous animal. Slaughter of the harmless was something else, like killing animals without need of their skin, flesh, gut, or bone. No good would come of it. “We shall see,” he replied. “White Water, do you and Spearpoint carry Running Fox back to his burial. Broken Blade and I will settle with Aryuk.” He gave no time for talk about that, but struck out at once. The quarry had a long head start.

Otherwise there was little more to fear than evil spirits and whatever uncanny powers Aryuk possessed. Red Wolf doubted he had any. The hunters were paired only because the trail might grow difficult and because it was seldom wise to travel partnerless.

The tracks led north. As the shore dropped from sight behind him, Red Wolf saw that he followed a man who had already begun to weaken. Answerer’s story had been confused, but the shaman thought Aryuk took a blow before felling his enemy. The heart laughed in Red Wolf’s breast.

The brief day ended. For a while he and Broken Blade pushed on. If they looked closely they could still trace the spoor by starlight and, later, moonlight. It went slowly, but that did not matter, for they saw how Aryuk had grown slower yet and ever oftener must stop to rest.

Then clouds drew together, smothering sight. Perforce the hunters called a halt. Without fire, they ate of their jerky and rolled up in their sleeping robes. The softest of touches on his face roused Red Wolf. Snowfall. Father of Wolves, make this cease, he begged.

It did not. Morning was hushed and gray, skyless, full of white flakes through which men could barely see a spearcast’s length. For some time they were able to creep onward, brushing the powdery new snow off the old, but at last that was impossible. “We have lost him,” sighed Broken Blade. “Now his tribe must pay.”

“Maybe not,” responded Red Wolf, who had been thinking. “We cannot be far behind him. He may well be on the other side of the next hill. Let us abide.”

The air had warmed sufficiently that they could sit almost in comfort. Lynx-patient, they waited.

About midday the snowfall ended. They went on north. The going was hard, through stuff light but ankle-deep, sometimes knee-deep. Would that I had magical shoes to walk on top of this, Red Wolf thought. Do Tall Man and Sun Hair? They own so much else that is wonderful … Well, Aryuk is hindered too, worse than us.

From a ridge they saw hugely ahead, across the steppe. Clouds had parted and shadows reached long and blue over purity. Every bush and boulder stood marked. Right, left, forward the men peered, until Broken Blade pointed and cried, “Yonder!”

Red Wolf’s heart jumped. “Maybe. Come.” They struggled downslope. By the time they reached what they had glimpsed, the sun was gone, but some light remained by which to read the troubled snow.

“Yes, a man,” said Red Wolf. “Surely no long way off. See how he floundered and … yes, here he stumbled, fell, and picked himself up awkwardly.” His mittened hand tensed on the spearshaft. “He is ours.”

They went on at an easier pace than before, saving their strength, less for the prey than for the trek home afterward. Night rolled across the world. The sky was mostly clear, the moon still down; stars were soon aswarm, frost-sharp. The trail stayed plain.

Suddenly Broken Blade stopped short. Red Wolf heard his gasp and likewise looked up. Above the northern horizon, the Winter Hunters were kindling their fires.

In billows and rays light shivered aloft, brighter, higher, brighter, higher, until it licked at the roof of heaven. Cold had deepened and all sound lay frozen. Only the sheen of light on snow was alive. Awed beyond terror, the men stared. There danced the mightiest of their forebears, ghosts too strong for earth to hold them.

“Yet you are ours,” Red Wolf breathed at last. “You remember, do you not? Watch over us. Ward us. Keep horrors and vengeful ghosts from us, your sons. In your name, for you, we make our kill tonight.”

“I think they have come for that,” said Broken Blade as low.

“We should not keep them waiting.” Red Wolf moved onward.

Presently he saw something, a blot on the snow beneath the chill fires. He hastened his stride. The other must have seen him in turn, for a shrill, keening chant reached his ears. What, did Vole men also sing their death songs?

As he neared, he made Aryuk out, seated cross-legged in a hollow he had scooped for himself. “I will do this, Broken Blade,” Red Wolf said. “Running Fox was close to my spirit.” He went on as if no fresh snow burdened his feet.

Aryuk rose. He moved very slowly, clumsily, his last strength spent. But he never cringed. He finished his song and stood slump-shouldered, left arm lashed to his side below the skin cloak, yet steadfast. Frost whitened his beard. When Red Wolf drew nigh, he smiled.

Smiled.

Red Wolf halted. What was this? What might it portend?

The silent fires burned overhead, commanding him. He took another step, and another.

Here is no animal brought to bay, he knew. Aryuk is ready for death. Well, he shall have it as easily as I can give it. He has earned that much.

Two-handed, he thrust the spear. Bone and keen flint went in below the breast and up to find the heart. The blow felt oddly soft, into so worn and wasted a body. Aryuk toppled before it, onto his back. Once he kicked, and his throat rattled. Then he was quiet.

Red Wolf withdrew the spear and leaned on it, staring downward. Broken Blade joined him. The flames leaped and shook in heaven.

“It is done,” said Broken Blade finally, tonelessly.

“Not altogether,” answered Red Wolf.

He took the graven bone from his pouch and clamped it between his teeth. Kneeling, he opened Aryuk’s pouch. Nothing was in it but—yes—He drew out the eyes of Running Fox. “You shall go back to him,” he promised. Giving them to Broken Blade: “Wrap these well and sing them the Spirit Song. I have other tasks.”

Even for one who knew he was doomed and who was emptied by weariness, Aryuk died calmly. Almost happily, as far as I could tell by this witch-light. What did he know? What did he mean to do … later?

Well, he shall not. Answerer has told me how to bind a ghost.

Red Wolf did to the body what had been done to Running Fox’s. He crushed the eyeballs between two stones he dug from the snow. He slit the belly and laid more stones among the entrails. He tied wrists and ankles with thongs of wolverine leather. He drove a spear through the chest and out the back, as deeply into the ice beneath as he could. He danced around the corpse while he called on his namesake, the Father of Wolves, to send more wolves—and foxes, weasels, owls, ravens, all manner of carrion eaters—to devour it.

“Now it is done,” he said. “Come.”

He felt exhausted himself; but he would walk as long as he was able before he slept. When morning came, he and Broken Blade ought to spy a landmark, such as a distant mountain, and find their way home.

They set forth across the steppe, beneath the spirit fires.

IX

To Wanda Tamberly, over the months the old rogue mammoth had come to be like a friend. She almost hated to bid him goodbye. But now he’d given her what information he could, which might well include a key to the entire history of Beringia. If she hoped to learn more about other aspects, she’d better get busy on them. “Already” her superiors wanted her elsewhere and elsewhen. It was with difficulty, as messages went to and fro across space-time, that she had persuaded them to let her spend just a bit more lifespan here, finish out the season and observe one last interstadial spring. She suspected that they suspected her real reason was to see, in daily detail, how her Tulat would fare.

Not that genuine science did not remain to be done, man-centuries’ worth of it. She had heard that civilian researchers made studies of their own, both pastward and futureward of this period. But they came from civilizations uptime of hers, too alien for her ever to work with them. She was of the Patrol, whose concern was with things impinging directly on human affairs.

There were advantages to that, she often reflected. The real comprehension of an ecology lay in its foundations, geology, meteorology, chemistry, microbes, plants, worms, insects, humble small vertebrates. She got to trail the big glamorous creatures near the top of the food chain. Of course, she too must gather a lot of nitty-gritty data. In a general way, she oversaw the activities of the tiny robots that scuttled beetlelike about, sampling, observing, passing information on to the computer in her dome. But she also followed slot, examined scat, watched from a distance or from a blind, punted around lakes, mingled with herds; and that was fine, fun, real.

I’ll be sorry to leave for good. Although—her spine tingled—next assignment, Crô-Magnon Europe?

She had made this trip alone. Wanayimo guides were often invaluable, much better than any Tulat before them, but must not be exposed to really high tech. Loaded with camp gear, her timecycle rose on antigravity till it hung high. Instruments gave her a final look around. Their sensitivity and versatility were part of the reason that she, all by herself, could report on an entire region after a couple of years’ work. Overleaping miles, piercing mists, amplifying light, they spotted single animals and brought views as magnified as she wanted before her eyes. Musk oxen stood back to the wind, a hare lolloped through drifting snow, a ptarmigan took wing, and yonder wandered and grumbled the old mammoth….

Upon the vast white land, his shagginess was dark as the cliffs rearing northward. His one tusk scuffed snow off moss and his trunk grubbed the fodder. It was sparse, but the best that a solitary male, defeated in fight and driven from his fellows, could find. Sometimes Tamberly had thought that mercy required she shoot him. No, he was providing an important clue; and now that she had it, well, leave him in his gaunt pride. Who knew, he might survive into summer and fill his belly again.

“Thanks, Jumbo,” she called across the wind. She believed she had discovered why his kind were growing scarce in Beringia, while continuing common in both Siberia and North America. Though the land bridge was still hundreds of miles wide, rising sea level had shrunk it, even as encroaching birch scrub changed the nature of the steppe. She hadn’t known that these elephantines were so dependent on specific conditions. Elsewhere, related species occupied a variety of habitats. But the rogue had not gone south to the seaboard woods and grasslands, he had gone north to scrape out a marginal existence under the mountains.

This in turn bore implications that excited Ralph Corwin. Although the Paleo-Indians hunted game of every sort, mammoth was the prize. In Beringia they’d wipe out the already threatened herds of any given area in the course of a few generations; it is another myth that primitive man lives in harmonious balance with the life around him. The presence of mammoth farther east would then draw adventurous persons onward sooner than would otherwise have been the case, in spite of today’s Alaska being for the most part pretty desolate.

Therefore, probably the migration into America went more quickly than he had supposed, and later waves of it had a distinctly different character from their predecessors…. However, this couldn’t account for the Cloud People moving away as early as next year….

The wind swirled and bit. Vapors blew around her, gray rags. Let’s get back and put our feet up with a nice hot cuppa. Tamberly set controls and activated.

In her dome she dismounted, shoved the hopper into its place amidst the kipple, and switched off the antigrav. The machine thumped a few inches down onto the floor. She rubbed her bottom. Hoo boy, the saddle was cold! Next job, if it’s Ice Age too, first I put in for heating coils.

As she stripped, sponge-bathed, donned loose clothes, she wondered what to do about Corwin. Presumably he was elsewhere. Were he in his own place, his timecycle would have registered this arrival of hers and he’d doubtless have popped right over with an invitation to a drink and dinner. It would be hard to decline gracefully when she’d been gone for ten days. So far she’d managed to get him talking about himself, which diverted his attention and was, she admitted, by no means uninteresting. Sooner or later, though, he was pretty sure to make a serious pass, and in that she was posolutely not interested. How to avoid an unpleasant scene?

Too bad Manse isn’t an anthropologist. He’s comfort-able to be with, like an old shoe—a shoe that’s hiked a lot of very strange trails, and stayed sturdy. I wouldn’t need to worry about him. If perchance he did make a pass—Hey, I’m not blushing, am I?

She brewed her tea and settled down. A voice at the entrance broke through: “Hullo, Wanda. How’ve you done?”

I guess he was just down in the village. Damn. “Okay,” she called. “Uh, look, I’m awfully tired, lousy company. Could I rest up till tomorrow?”

“’Fraid not.” The solemnity sounded honest. “Bad news.”

An icicle stabbed. She got to her feet. “Coming.”

“I think you’d best step outside. I’ll wait.” And only the wind sounded.

She scrambled into wool socks, down-lined pants, boots, parka. When she emerged, the wind cut at her. It drove ice-dust low across the ground. Sinking behind southern hills, the sun ignited a multitudinous hard glitter in the drift. Also dressed for the weather, Corwin and Red Wolf stood side by side. Their countenances were stark.

“Good fortune to you,” Tamberly greeted through the whistling.

“Good spirits travel with you,” the Cloud man answered as formally and flatly.

“This tale is for Red Wolf to tell,” Corwin stated in the same language. “He told me he should. When I knew you had returned, I fetched him.”

Tamberly looked into the hunter’s eyes. They never wavered. “Your friend Aryuk is dead,” he declared. “I slew him. It was necessary.”

For a moment the world darkened. Then: Bear up. This is a stoic culture. Don’t lose face. “Why is this?”

The narration was short and dignified.

“You could not have spared him?” she asked dully. “I would have paid … enough to give Running Fox his honor.”

“You have told us you will leave in a few more moons, and Tall Man will not stay much longer,” Red Wolf answered. “After that, what? Other Vole men would think they could harm others of us and go free too. Also, Aryuk had won power over Running Fox’s ghost. Had we not recovered what he took, after death his own ghost would have been twice as strong, and surely full of hatred. I had to make sure he will never walk among us.”

“I have gotten a promise that there will be no further revenge on the Tulat,” said Corwin, “if they behave themselves.”

“That shall be true,” Red Wolf affirmed. “We do not wish to grieve you further, Sun Hair.” He paused. “I am sorry. I never wished to grieve you at all.”

He made a dismissing gesture, turned, and walked slowly off.

I cannot hate him, Tamberly thought. He did what he saw as his duty. I cannot hate him.

Oh, Aryuk, Tseshu, everybody who loved you, Aryuk!

“Tragic,” Corwin murmured after a minute. “But take comfort.”

It flared in Tamberly. “How can I, when he—when his family—I’ve got to look after them, at least.”

“Their own people will.” Corwin laid a hand on her shoulder. “My dear, you must control those generous impulses of yours. We may not intervene more than we already have. What could you do for anyone that is not forbidden? Besides, this tribe will soon be gone.”

“How much will be left by then? God damn it, we can’t just stand idle!”

He donned sternness. “Calm down. You can’t bluff the Wanayimo into anything. If you try, it will only complicate my work. Frankly, as matters stand, you have cost me some prestige, by association, when the news obviously stunned you.”

She knotted her fists and struggled not to weep.

He smiled. “But there, I didn’t mean to play Dutch uncle. You must learn to accept. ‘The moving Finger writes, and having writ,’ y’know.” Gently, he embraced her. “Come, let’s go inside and have a drink or three. We’ll toast memories and—”

She tore loose. “Leave me alone!” she cried.

“I beg your pardon?” He raised frosted brows. “Really, my dear, you’re overwrought. Relax. Listen to an old campaigner.”

“You wanna know what the moving Finger should do to you? Leave me alone, I said!” She grabbed at her dome opener. Through the wind, did she hear a resigned girls-will-be-girls sigh?

Sheltered, she flung herself on her bunk and let go. It took a long while.

When at last she sat up, darkness enclosed her. She hiccoughed, trembled, felt as cold as if she were still outside. Her mouth was salt. I must look a fright, she thought vaguely.

Her mind sharpened. Why has this hit me so hard? I liked Aryuk, he was a darling, and it’s going to be grim for his folks, at least till they can rearrange their lives, which’ll be tough to do with the Cloud People battening on everybody, but—but I’m no Tula, I’m only passing through, these are old, unhappy, far-off things, they happened thousands of years before I was born.

Corwin’s right, the bastard. We in the Patrol, we’ve got to get case-hardened. As much as we can. I think now I see why Manse sometimes suddenly falls quiet, stares beyond me, then shakes his head as though trying to throw something off and for the next few minutes gets a little overhearty.

She hammered fist on knee. I’m too new in the game. I’ve too much rage and sorrow in me. Especially rage, I think. What to do about it? If I want to stay on here any longer, I’d better make up with Corwin, more or less. Yeah, I was overreacting. I am right now. Maybe. Anyhow, before I can straighten things out I’ve got to straighten me out. Work off this that’s in me and tastes like sickness.

How? A long, long walk, yes. Only it’s night. No problem. I’ll hop uptime to morning. Only I don’t want anybody seeing me stalk off. Unseemly display of emotion, and might give wrong ideas. Okay, I’ll hop elsewhere as well as elsewhen, way away to the seashore or out on the steppe or—

Or.

She gasped.

X

Morning stole gray through falling snow. All else lay white and silent. The air had warmed a little. Aryuk sat hunched in his cloak. The snow had partly buried him. Perhaps he would rise and stagger onward, but not yet, and perhaps never. Although he felt hunger no more, his wound was fire-coals and his legs had buckled under him during the night. When the woman descended from unseen heaven, he simply stared in sluggish wonder.

She got off the unalive thing she rode and stood before him. Snow settled on her head covering. Where it touched her face and melted, it ran down like tears. “Aryuk,” she whispered.

Twice he could utter nothing but a croak, before he asked, “Have you too come after me?” He raised his heavy head. “Well, here I am.”

“Oh, Aryuk.”

“Why, you are crying,” he said, surprised.

“For you.” She swallowed, wiped the eyes that were blue as summer, straightened, looked more steadily down at him.

“Then you are still the friend of Us?”

“I, I always was.” She knelt and hugged him. “I always will be.” His breath hissed. She let go. “Did that hurt? I’m sorry.” She studied bound arm and blood-caked shoulder. “Yes, you’ve been hurt. Terribly. Let me help you.”

Gladness flickered faint. “Will you help Tseshu and the young?”

“If I can—Yes, I will. But you first. Here.” She fumbled in a garment and drew forth an object he recognized. “Here is Lovely Sweet.”

With his good hand and teeth he stripped off the wrapping. Eagerly, he ate. Meanwhile she got a box from the thing she rode. He knew about boxes, having seen her use them before. She came back, knelt again, bared her hands. “Do not be afraid,” she said.

“I am no longer afraid, with you by me.” He licked his lips. His fingers followed, to make sure none of the brown stuff was left behind. The ice in his beard crackled to their touch.

She put a small thing against his skin near the wound. “This will take away pain,” she said. He felt a slight shoving. On its heels ran a wave of peace, warmth, not-pain.

“A-a-ah,” he breathed. “You do beautiful works.”

She busied herself, cleaning and treating. “How did this come about?”

He didn’t want to remember, but because it was she who asked, he said, “Two Mammoth Slayers came to our place—”

“Yes, I have heard what the one told who escaped. Why did you attack the other one?”

“He laid hands on Tseshu. He said he would take her away. I forgot myself.” Aryuk could not pretend to her that he was really sorry for the deed, in spite of the evil it brought. “That was foolish. But I was again a man.”

“I see.” Her smile mourned. “Now the Cloud People are on your trail.”

“I thought they would be.”

“They will kill you.”

“This snow may break the trail too much for them.”

She bit her lip. He heard that it was very hard for her to say, “They will kill you. I can do nothing about that.”

He shook his head. “Do you truly know? I do not see how it can be certain.”

“I am not sure I see either,” she whispered, keeping her gaze upon her busy hands. “But it is.”

“I hoped I might die alone, and they find my body.”

“That would not satisfy them. They think they must kill, because a man of theirs was killed. If it is not you, it will be your kindred.”

He took a long breath, watched the tumbling snow for a bit, and chuckled. “So it is good that they kill me. I am ready. You have taken away my pain, you have filled my mouth with Lovely Sweet, you have laid your arms about me.”

Her voice came hoarse. “It will be quick. It will not hurt much.”

“And it will not be for nothing. Thank you.” That was seldom spoken among the Tulat, who took kindnesses for granted. “Wanda,” he went on shyly. “Did you not say once that is your real name? Thank you, Wanda.”

She let the work go, sat back on her haunches, and made herself look straight at him. “Aryuk,” she said low, “I can do … something more for you. I can make your death more than a payment for what happened.”

Amazed, marveling, he asked, “How? Only tell me.”

She doubled a fist. “It will not be easy for you. Just dying would be much easier, I think.” Louder: “Though how can I know?”

“You know all things.”

“Oh, God, no” She stiffened. “Hear me. Then if you believe you can bear it, I will give you food, a drink that strengthens, and—and my help—” She choked.

His astonishment grew. “You seem afraid, Wanda.”

“I am,” she sobbed. “I am terrified. Help me, Aryuk.”

XI

Red Wolf awoke. Something heavy had moved.

He turned his head right and left. Again the moon was full, small and as cold as the air. From the roof of heaven its light poured down and glistered away over the snow. As far as he could see, the steppe reached empty, save for boulders and bare, stiffened bushes. He thought the noise—a whoosh, a thump, a crack like tiny thunder—had come from behind the big rock near which he, Horsecatcher, Caribou Antler, and Spearpoint had made their hunters’ camp.

“Forth and ready!” he called. He slipped free of his bag and took weapons in a single motion. The rest did the same. They had slept half awake too, in this brilliant night.

“Like nothing I ever heard before.” Red Wolf beckoned them to take stance at his sides.

Black against the moonlit snow, a man-form trod from around the rock and moved toward them.

Horsecatcher peered. “Why, it is a Vole,” he said, laughing in relief.

“This far inland?” wondered Caribou Antler.

The shape walked steadily closer. A badly made skin cloak covered most of it, but the hunters saw that it carried a thing that was not a hand ax. As it drew near they descried features, bushy hair and beard, hollowed-out face.

Spearpoint rocked. “It is he, the one we went after with Running Fox,” he wailed.

“But I killed you, Aryuk!” Red Wolf shouted.

Horsecatcher screamed, whirled about, dashed off across the plain.

“Stop!” Red Wolf yelled. “Hold fast!”

Caribou Antler and Spearpoint bolted. Almost, Red Wolf himself did. Horror seized him as a hawk seizes a lemming.

Somehow he overcame it. If he ran, he knew, he was helpless, no longer a man. His left hand raised the hatchet, his right poised the lance for a cast. “I will not flee,” rattled from a tongue gone dry. “I killed you before.”

Aryuk halted a short way off. Moonlight welled in the eyes that Red Wolf had plucked out and crushed. He spoke in Wanayimo, of which he knew just a few words when he was alive. The voice was high, a ghastly echo underneath it. “You cannot kill a dead man.”

“It was, was far from here,” Red Wolf stammered. “I bound your ghost down with spells.”

“They were not strong enough. No spells will ever be strong enough.”

Through the haze of terror, Red Wolf saw that those feet had left tracks behind them like a living man’s. That made it the more dreadful. He would have shrieked and run the same as his comrades, but clung to the knowledge that he could surely not outspeed this, and having it at his back would be worse than he dared think about.

“Here I stand,” he gasped. “Do what you will.”

“What I would do is forever.”

I am not asleep. My spirit cannot escape into wakefulness. I can never escape.

“The ghosts of this land are full of winter anger,” rang Aryuk’s unearthly voice. “They stir in the earth. They walk in the wind. Go before they come after you. Leave their country, you and your people. Go.”

Even then, Red Wolf thought of Little Willow, their children, the tribe. “We cannot,” he pleaded. “We would die.”

“We will abide you until the snow melts, when you can again live in tents,” Aryuk said. “Until then, be afraid. Leave our living ones alone. In spring depart and never come back. I have fared a long, chill way to tell you this. I will not tell you twice. Go, as I now go.”

He turned and went off the way he had come. Red Wolf went on his belly in the snow. Thus he did not see Aryuk step behind the rock; but he heard the unnatural noise of his passing from the world of men.

XII

The moon was down. The sun was still remote. Stars and Spirit Trail cast a wan glow across whitened earth. In the village, folk slept.

Answerer the shaman woke when someone pulled his windbreak aside. At first he felt puzzlement, vexation, and mostly how his old bones ached. He crawled from beneath the skins and crouched by the hearth. It held ashes. Somebody brought him fresh fire each morning. “Who are you?” he asked the blackness that stood in the doorway athwart the stars. “What do you need?” A sudden illness, an onset of childbirth, a nightmare—

The newcomer entered and spoke. The sound was none that Answerer had ever heard before in life, dream, or vision. “You know me. Behold.”

Light glared, icily brilliant, like the light that Tall Man and Sun Hair could make shine from a stick. It streamed upward across a great beard, to gully the face above with shadows. Answerer screamed.

“Your men could kill me,” said Aryuk. “They could not bind me. I have come back to tell you that you must go.”

Answerer snatched after his wits and found the graven bone that lay always beside him. He pointed it. “No, you begone, ya eya eya illa ya-a!” Tight as his throat was, he could barely force the chant out.

Aryuk interrupted it. “Too long have your folk preyed on mine. Our blood on the land troubles the spirits beneath. Go, all Cloud People, go. Tell them this, shaman, or else come away with me.”

“Whence rise you?” whimpered Answerer.

“Would you know? I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would rip your soul, freeze your blood, make your two eyes break free like shooting stars, your hair unbraid and stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine. But instead, I go now. If you remain, Cloud People, I shall return. Remember me.”

The light snapped off. Once more the doorway was darkened, then the stars shone unmercifully through.

Answerer’s shrieks roused families nearby. Two or three men spied him who walked from them. They told themselves they should not pursue but rather see what help their shaman needed. They found him moaning and mumbling. Later he said that a dire vision had sought him. After sunrise, Broken Blade mustered courage to track the stranger. Some distance from the village, footprints ended. The snow was tumbled there. It was as if something had swooped down from the Spirit Trail.

XIII

Far off southeastward, beyond the ice and the open sea, the sky began to lighten. Stars yonder paled. One by one, they went out. Overhead, north, and west, night lingered. Above snow, whitenesses swirled off the hot springs. Nothing broke the silence but an undertone of waves.

A man-shape arrived at Ulungu’s kinstead. He moved heavily. When he stopped among the dwellings he stood bent-shouldered. His call rustled faint. “Tseshu, Tseshu.”

They stirred within. Men peeked past windbreaks. What they saw flung them back at the bodies crowded behind. “Aryuk, dead Aryuk!”

“Tseshu,” It begged, “this is only Aryuk, your man. I have only come to bid you farewell.”

“Wait here,” said his woman in the fear-stinking darkness. “I will go to him.”

“No, that is death.” Ulungu fumbled to hold her.

She fended him off. “He wants me,” she said, and crawled out. Rising, she stood before the cloaked form. “Here I am,” she told It.

“Do not be afraid,” said Aryuk—how gently, how wearily. “I bring no harm.”

The woman stared at him in wonderment. “You are dead,” she whispered. “They killed you. We heard. Men of theirs went among Us, along the whole shore, and gave Us that news.”

“Yes. That is how Wan—that is how I learned where you are.”

“They said the Red Wolf killed you for what you did and We should all beware.”

Aryuk nodded. “Yes, I died.”

Care trembled in her voice. “You are thin. You are tired.”

“It was a long journey,” he sighed.

She reached for him. “Your poor arm—”

He smiled a little. “Soon I shall rest. It will be good to lie down.”

“Why have you come back?”

“I am not yet dead.”

“You said you are.”

“Yes. I died a moon or more ago, beneath the Ghost Birds.”

“How is this?” she asked, bewildered.

“I do not understand. What I know, I may not tell you. But when I begged leave, I was given my wish, that I could come see you this last time.”

“Aryuk, Aryuk.” She went to him and laid her head against his beard and mane. He brought his usable arm around her.

“You shiver, Tseshu,” he said. “It is cold and you have nothing on. Get back inside where it is warm. I must go now.”

“Take me with you, Aryuk,” she faltered through tears. “We were so long together.”

“I may not do that,” he answered. “Stay. Care for the young ones, for everyone of Us. Go home to our river. You will have peace. The Mammoth Slayers will trouble you no more. In spring when the snow melts, they will go away.”

She raised her face. “This … is … a great thing.”

“It is what I give you and Us.” He looked past her to the dying stars. “I am glad.”

She clung to him and wept.

“Do not cry,” he pleaded. “Let me remember you glad.”

Light strengthened. “I must leave,” he said. “Let me go, let me go.” He had to draw her arms from him before he could depart. She stood gazing after him till he had limped out of sight.

XIV

Tamberly brought her hopper across space-time and down through the snowfall to earth. She dismounted. Aryuk, who had held onto her waist on this as on other quick flights, left the rear saddle. For a span they were mute amidst the flakes and the gray morning.

“Is it done?” he asked finally.

She nodded. Her neck felt stiff. “It is done. As well as I was able.”

“That is good.” His right hand fumbled about his person. “Here, I give you back your treasures.” Piece by piece he returned them—flashlight; audiovisual pickup by which she had seen and heard what he did, earplug receiver through which she instructed him, speaker that enabled her to talk Wanayimo for him, with lowered voice frequency and some spooky feedback resonance at the transmission end. She dropped them in the carrier.

“What shall I do next?” Aryuk inquired.

“Wait. If … if only I could wait with you!”

He considered. “You are kind, but I think I would rather be alone. I have remembering to do.”

“Yes.”

“Also,” he went on earnestly, “if I may, I would rather walk than sit still. Your magic gave me some haleness back. It is ebbing, but I would like to use it.”

Feel yourself alive while you can. “Yes, do as you wish. Walk onward until—oh, Aryuk!” He stood there so patiently. Already the snow had whitened his head.

“Do not cry,” he said, troubled. “You who command life and death should never feel weak or sad.”

She covered her eyes. “I can’t help it.”

“But I am glad.” He laughed. “This is good, what I can do for Us. You helped me. Be glad of that. I am. Let me remember you glad.”

She kissed him and smiled, smiled, as she remounted her timecycle.

XV

Wind brawled. The dome shuddered. Tamberly blinked into it, got off the vehicle, turned on lights against the gloom.

After a few minutes she heard: “Let me in!”

She hung up her outer garments. “Come on,” she replied.

Corwin stalked through. The wind caught at the entry fabric. He had a moment’s fight to reseal. Tamberly posed herself at the table. She felt frozenly calm.

He opened his parka as if he disemboweled an enemy and turned about. His mouth was stretched wide and tight. “So you’re back at last,” he rasped.

“Well, that’s what I thought,” she said.

“None of your insolence.”

“Sorry. None intended.” Her gesture at the chair was as indifferent as her tone. “Won’t you sit down? I’ll make tea.”

“No! Why have you been gone all these days?”

“Busy. In the field.” I needed the terrible innocence of the Ice Age and its beasts. “Wanted to make sure I’d complete the essentials of my research, what with the season drawing to a close.”

He quivered. “And what with you due for cashiering—mind block, or even the exile planet—”

She lifted a hand. “Whoa. That’s a matter for higher authority than yours, my friend.”

“Friend? After you betrayed—ruined—Did you imagine I wouldn’t know what had to be behind those … apparitions? What your purpose was—to destroy my work—”

The blond head shook. “Why, no. You can continue with the Wanayimo if you see fit, as long as you want to. And then there are plenty of later generations waiting.”

“Causal vortex—endangerment—”

“Please. You told me yourself, the Cloud People will push on come spring. It is written. The moving Finger,’ you know. I simply gave it a little boost. And that was written too, wasn’t: it?”

“No! You dared—you played God.” His forefinger jabbed toward her like a spear. “That’s why you didn’t return here to the moment after you left on your insane jaunt. You hadn’t the nerve to face me.”

“I knew I’d have to do that. But I figured it’d be smart if the natives didn’t see me for a while. They’d have plenty else on their minds. I hope you kept well in the background.”

“Perforce. The harm you did was irreparable. I wasn’t about to make it worse.”

“When the fact is that they did decide to leave these parts.”

“Because you—”

“Something had to cause it, right? Oh, I know the rules. I’ve jumped uptime, entered a report, been summoned for a hearing. Tomorrow I’ll pack up.” And say goodbye to the land and, yes, the Cloud People, Red Wolf. Wish him well.

“I’ll be at that session,” Corwin vowed. “I’ll take pleasure in bringing the charges.”

“Not your department, I think.”

He gaped at her. “You’ve changed,” he mumbled. “You were … a promising girl. Now you’re a cold, scheming bitch.”

“If you’ve expressed your opinion, goodnight, Dr. Corwin.”

His visage contorted. His open hand cracked upon her cheek.

She staggered, caught her footing, blinked from the pain, but was able to speak quietly. “I said, ‘Goodnight, Dr. Corwin.’”

He made a noise, wheeled, groped at the entry fastener, got the dome open, and stumbled from her.

I guess I have changed, she thought. Grown some. Or so I hope. They’ll decide at the … court-martial… the hearing. Maybe they’ll break me. Maybe that’s the right thing for them to do. All I know is that I did what I must, and be damned if I’m sorry.

The wind blew harder. A few snowflakes flew upon it, outriders of winter’s last great blizzard.

13,210 B.C.

Clouds loomed whiter than the snowbanks that lingered here and there upon moss and shrub. The sun, striding higher every lengthening day, dazzled eyes. Its light flared off pools and meres, above which winged the earliest migratory birds. Flowers were in bud over all. Trodden on, they sent a breath of green into the air.

Just once did Little Willow look back, past the straggling lines of the tribe to the homes they were leaving, the work of their hands. Red Wolf sensed what she felt. He laid an arm about her. “We shall find new and better lands, and those we shall keep, and our children and children’s children after us,” he said.

So had Sun Hair promised them before she and Tall Man vanished with their tents, as mysteriously as they had come. “A new world.” He did not understand, but he believed, and made his people believe.

Little Willow’s gaze sought her man again. “No, we could not stay.” Her voice wavered. “Those moons of fear, when any night the ghost might return—But today I remember what we had and hoped for.”

“It lies ahead of us,” he answered.

A child caught her heed, darting recklessly aside. She went after the brat. Red Wolf smiled.

Then he too was grave, he too remembered—a woman whose hair and eyes were summer. He would always remember. Would she?

1990 A. D.

The timecycle appeared in the secret place underground. Everard dismounted, gave Tamberly his hand, helped her off the rear saddle. They went upstairs to a closet-small room. Its door was locked, but the lock knew him and let them into a corridor lined with packing cases which served as overloaded bookshelves. At the front of the store Everard told the proprietor, “Nick, we need your office for a while.”

The little man nodded. “Sure. I’ve been expecting you. Laid in what you hinted you’d want.” “Thanks. You’re a good joe. This way, Wanda.” Everard and Tamberly entered the cluttered room. He shut the door. She sank into the chair behind the desk and stared out at a backyard garden. Bees hummed about marigolds and petunias. Nothing except the wall beyond and an undercurrent of traffic bespoke San Francisco in the late twentieth century. The contents of a coffeepot were hot and reasonably fresh. Neither of them cared for milk or sugar. Instead, they found two snifters and a bottle of Calvados. He poured.

“How’re you doing by now?” he asked.

“Exhausted,” she muttered, still looking through the window.

“Yeah, it was rough. Had to be.”

“I know.” She took her coffee and drank. Her voice regained some life. “I deserved worse, much worse.”

He put bounce into his own words. “Well, it’s over with. You go enjoy your furlough, get a good rest, put the nightmare behind you. That’s an order.” He offered her a brandy glass. “Cheers.”

She turned around and touched rims with him. “Salud.” He sat down across from her. They tasted. The aroma swirled darkly sweet.

Presently she looked straight at him and said low, “It was you who got me off the hook, wasn’t it? I don’t mean just your arguing for me at the hearing—though Lordy, if ever a person needed a friend—That was mostly pro forma, wasn’t it?”

“Smart girl.” He sipped afresh, put the goblet aside, reached for pipe and tobacco pouch. “Yes, of course. I’d done my politicking behind the scenes. There were those who wanted to throw the book at you, but they got, uh, persuaded that a reprimand would suffice.”

“No. It didn’t.” She shuddered. “What they showed me, though, the records—”

He nodded. “Consequences of time gone awry. Bad.” He made a production of stuffing the pipe, keeping his glance on it. “Well, frankly, you did need that lesson.”

She drew an uneven breath. “Manse, the trouble I’ve caused you—”

“No, don’t feel obligated. Please. I had a duty, after I’d heard what the situation was.” He looked up. “You see, in a way this was the Patrol’s fault. You’d been meant for a naturalist. Your indoctrination was minimal. Then the outfit allowed you to get involved in something for which you weren’t prepared, trained, anything. It’s human. It makes its share of mistakes. But it can damn well admit to them afterward.”

“I don’t want excuses for myself. I knew I was violating the rules.” Tamberly squared her shoulders. “And I’m not—not repentant, even now.” She drank again.

“Which you had the guts to tell the board.” Everard made fire and brought it to the tobacco. He nursed it along till the blue cloud was going well. “That worked in your favor. We need courage, initiative, acceptance of responsibility, more than we need nice, safe routineers. Besides, you didn’t actually try to change history. That would have been unforgivable. All you did was take a hand in it. Which, maybe, was in the pattern of events from the first. Or maybe not. Only the Danellians know.”

Awed, she wondered, “Do they care, so far in the future?”

He nodded. “I think they must. I suspect this matter got bucked clear up to them.”

“Because of you, Manse, you, an Unattached agent.”

He shrugged. “Could be. Or maybe they … watched. Anyway, I’ve a hunch that the decision to pardon you came down from them. In which case you’re more important, somewhere up the line, than either of us today knows.”

Amazement shrilled: “Me?”

“Potentially, anyhow.” He wagged the pipestem at her. “Listen, Wanda. I broke the law myself once, early in my service, because it seemed like the single decent thing to do. I was ready for punishment. The Patrol can not accommodate self-righteousness. But the upshot was, I got tapped for special training and eventual Unattached status.”

She shook her head. “You were you. I’m not that good.”

“You mean you’re not that kind of good. I do still doubt you have the makings of a cop. Something else, however—For sure, you’ve got the right stuff.” He lifted his glass. “Here’s to!”

She drank with him, but silently.

After a while she said, tears on her lashes, “I can never truly thank you, Manse.”

“Hm-m.” He grinned. “You can try. For openers, how about dinner this evening?”

She drew back. “Oh—” The sound trailed off.

He regarded her. “You don’t feel up to it, huh?”

“Manse, you’ve done so much for me. But—”

He nodded. “Plumb wore out. Absolutely understandable.”

She hugged herself, as if a wind off a glacier had touched her. “And, and haunted.”

“I can understand that too,” he said.

“If I can just be alone for a while, somewhere peaceful.”

“And come to terms with what happened.” He blew smoke at the ceiling. “Of course. I’m sorry. I should have realized.”

“Later—”

He smiled, gently this time. “Later you’ll be yourself again. That is certain. You’re too healthy not to.”

“And then—” She couldn’t finish.

“We’ll discuss it when the time is right.” Evérard laid his pipe aside. “Wanda, you’re about ready to keel over. Relax. Enjoy your applejack. Doze off if you want. I’ll call for a taxi and take you home.”

PART FIVE

RIDDLE ME THIS

1990 A. D.

Lightning flickered in darkness, bright enough to pierce through the lamps of New York. Thunder was still too distant to overcome traffic rush; wind and rain would follow.

Everard made himself look squarely at the enigma who sat opposite him in his apartment. “I thought the matter was settled,” he declared.

“Considerable dissatisfaction remained,” said Guion in his deceptively pedantic English.

“Yeah. I pulled rank and wires, threw my weight around, cashed in favors owing to me. But I am an Unattached and it was, it is my judgment that punishing Tamberly for doing what was morally right would accomplish nothing except lose us a good operative.”

Guion’s tone stayed level. “The morality of taking sides in foreign conflicts is debatable. And you, of all people, should know that we do not amend reality, we defend it.”

Everard knotted a fist. “You, of all people, should know that that isn’t always exactly true,” he snapped.

Deciding that he likewise had better keep this peaceable: “I told her I didn’t think I could’ve pulled it off if some kind of word hadn’t come down from on high. Was I right?”

Guion evaded that, smiling slightly and saying, “What I came here for is to give you personal reassurance that the case is indeed closed. You will find no more lingering resentments among your colleagues, no unspoken accusations of favoritism. They now agree that you acted properly.”

Everard stared. “Huh?” Several heartbeats passed. “How the devil was that done? As independent a bunch as ever bearded any king—”

“Suffice that it was done, and without compromising their independence. Stop fretting. Give that Middle Western conscience of yours a rest.”

“Well, uh, well, this is awfully kind of you—Hey, I’ve been mighty inhospitable, haven’t I? Care for a drink?”

“I would not say no to a light Scotch and soda.”

Everard scrambled from his chair and sought the bar. “I am grateful, believe me.”

“You needn’t be. This is more a business trip than an errand of mercy. You see, you have earned a certain amount of special consideration. You have proved too valuable an agent for the Patrol to want you unnecessarily hampered by unwilling and incomplete cooperation.”

Everard busied his hands. “Me? No false modesty, but in a million years of recruitment the outfit has got to have found a lot of guys a lot more able than me.”

“Or me. Sometimes, however, individuals have a significance far beyond their ostensible worth. Not that you or I count for nothing in ourselves. But as an illustration of the general principle, take, oh, Alfred Dreyfus. He was a competent and conscientious officer, an asset to France. But it was because of what happened to him that great events came about.”

Everard scowled. “Do you mean he was … an instrument of destiny?”

“You know very well there is no such thing as destiny. There is the structure of the plenum, which we strive to preserve.”

I s’pose, Everard thought. Though that structure isn’t just changeable in time as well as space. It seems to be subtler and trickier than they see fit to teach us about at the Academy. Coincidences can be more than accidents. Maybe Jung glimpsed a little of the truth, in his notions about synchrony—I dunno. The universe isn’t for the likes of me to understand. I only work here. He drew himself a Heineken’s, added a shot of akvavit on the side, and brought the refreshments back on a tray.

As he settled down, he murmured, “I suspect the way has also been smoothed for Specialist Tamberly.”

“What makes you think that?” replied Guion noncommittally.

“On your last visit you were inquiring about her, and she’s mentioned an evening with you while she was a cadet. I doubt that … whoever sent you … would be so interested in the average recruit.”

Guion nodded. “Her world line, like yours, appears to impinge on many others.” He paused. “Appears, I say.”

Unease stirred afresh. Everard reached for pipe and tobacco pouch. “What the hell is going on, anyway?” he demanded. “What’s this all about?”

“We hope it is nothing extraordinary.”

“What are you hoping against?”

Guion met Everard’s gaze. “I cannot say precisely. It may well be unknowable.”

“Tell me something, for Christ’s sake!”

Guion sighed. “Monitors have observed anomalous variations in reality.”

“Aren’t they all?” Everard asked. And few of them matter much. You might say the course of the world has enormous inertia. The effects of most changes made by time travelers soon damp out. Other things happen that compensate. Negative feedback. How many little fluctuations go on, to and fro, hither and yon? How constant, really, is reality? That’s a question without any fixed answer and maybe without any meaning.

But once in a while you do get a nexus, where some key incident decides the whole large-scale future, for better or worse.

The calm voice chilled him. “These have no known cause. That is, we have failed to identify any chronokinetic sources. For example, the Asinaria of Plautus is first performed in 213 B.C., and in 1196 A.D. Stefan Nemanya, Grand Zhupan of Serbia, abdicates in favor of his son and retires to a monastery. I could list several other instances in either of those approximate times, some as far away from Europe as China.”

Everard tossed off his shot and chased it with a long draught. “Don’t bother,” he said harshly. “I can’t place those two you did. What’s strange about them and the rest?”

“The precise dates of their occurrences do not agree with what scholars from their future have recorded. Nor do various other minor details, such as the exact text of that play or the exact objects depicted on a certain scroll by Ma Yuan.” Guion sipped. “Minor, mind you. Nothing that changes the general pattern of later events, or even anyone’s daily life to a noticeable degree. Nevertheless they indicate instability in those sections of history.”

Everard fought down a shudder. “Two-thirteen B.C., did you say?” My God. The Second Punic War. He stuffed his pipe with needless force.

Guion nodded again. “You were largely responsible for aborting that catastrophe.”

“How many others have there been?” Everard rasped.

The query was absurd, put in English. Before he could go to Temporal, Guion said, “That is a problem inherently insolvable. Think about it.”

Everard did.

“The Patrol, existent humankind, the Danellians themselves owe you much because of the Carthaginian episode,” Guion continued after a silent while. “If you wish, regard the steps lately taken on your behalf as a small recompense.”

“Thanks.” Everard struck fire and puffed hard. “Although I wasn’t being entirely unselfish, you realize. I wanted my home world back.” He tautened. “What have these anomalies you speak of got to do with me?”

“Quite possibly nothing.”

“Or with Wanda—Specialist Tamberly? What’re you getting at with the pair of us?”

Guion lifted a hand. “Please don’t develop resentments of your own. I know of your desire for emotional privacy, your feeling that it is somehow your right.”

“Where I come from, it damn well is,” Everard grumbled. His cheeks smoldered.

“But if the Patrol is to watch and guard the evolution of the ages, must it not also watch over itself? You have in truth become one of the more important agents operating within the past three millennia. Because of this, whether you know it or not, your influence radiates farther than most. Inevitably, some of the action is through your friends. Tamberly did have a catalytic effect on a milieu she was supposed merely to study. When you protected her from the consequences of her act, you became involved in them. No harm was done in either case, and we do not expect that either of you will ever willingly or wittingly do harm; but you must understand that we want to know about you.”

The hairs stood up on Everard’s arms. “‘We,’ you say,” he whispered. “Who are you, Guion? What are you?”

“An agent like you, serving the same ends as you, except that my work is within the Patrol.”

Everard pushed the attack. “When are you from? The Danellian era?”

Defense broke down. “No!” Guion made a violent fending gesture. “I have never even met one!” He looked away. The aristocratic visage writhed. “You did, once, but I—No, I am nobody.”

You mean you are human, like me, Everard thought. We are both to the Danellians what Homo erectus—or Australopithecus?—is to us. Though you, born in a later and higher civilization, must know more about them than I’d be able to. Enough more to be terrified?

Guion recovered himself, drank, and said, again quietly, “I serve as I am bidden. That is all.”

With a sudden sympathy, an irrational wish to give comfort, that was itself heartening, Everard murmured, “And so at present you’re just tying up loose ends, clearing the decks, nothing fancy.”

“I hope so. I pray so.” Guion drew breath. He smiled. “Your commonplace way of putting it, your workaday attitude—what strength they give.”

Tension ebbed out of Everard too. “Okay. We went up a bad street for a minute, didn’t we? Actually, I shouldn’t worry, on my account or Wanda’s.”

Beneath his regained coolness, Guion sounded equally relieved. “That is what I came to assure you. The aftermath of your clash with Agent Corwin and others is no more. You can dismiss it from your mind and go about your business.”

“Thanks. Cheers.” They raised glasses.

It would take a little ordinary conversation, gossip and shop talk, to achieve genuine relaxation. “I hear you are preparing for a new mission,” Guion remarked.

Everard shrugged. “No biggie. Securing the Altamont case. You wouldn’t know about that, nor care.”

“No, please, you rouse my curiosity.”

“Well, why not?” Everard leaned back, puffed his pipe, savored his beer. “It’s in 1912. World War One is brewing. The Germans think they’ve found a spy who can infiltrate the opposition, an Irish-American called Altamont. Actually he’s an English agent, and in the end will turn the tables on them very neatly. The trouble from our viewpoint is, he’s too observant and smart. He’s uncovered certain odd goings-on. They could lead him to our military studies group in those years. A member of the group knows me and asked me to come help work up something to divert the man’s attention. Nothing major. Mainly we’ll have to do it in such a way that he doesn’t deduce something still curiouser is afoot. It should be kind of fun.”

“I see. Your life isn’t entirely hairbreadth adventure, then.”

“It better not be!”

They swapped trivia for an hour, till Guion took his leave. Alone, Everard felt hemmed in. Conditioned air hung lifeless around him. He went to a window and opened it. The lungful that he drew was sharp with the smell of the oncoming thunderstorm. Wind boomed and buffeted.

Foreboding touched him anew. He’s obviously a high-powered type. Would the far future really send him on an errand as trifling as what he described? Might they not, rather, be afraid of what he barely hinted at, a chaos they cannot chart and therefore cannot turn aside? Are they making what desperate provision they can?

Lightning flared like a banner suddenly flown above the enclosing towers. Everard’s mood responded. Cut that out. You’ve got the word that all’s well, haven’t you? Let him proceed in good spirits with his next job, and afterward seek what pleasure he could hope for.

PART SIX

AMAZEMENT OF THE WORLD

1137 α A. D.

The door opened. Sunlight struck bright and bleak into the silk merchant’s shop. Autumn air streamed after it, full of chill and street noises. Then the apprentice stumbled through. Seen from the dimness inside, against the day outside, he was almost a shadow. But they heard how he wept. “Master Geoffrey, oh, Master Geoffrey!”

Emil Volstrup left the desk at which he had stood doing accounts. The stares of the other two boys, one Italian and one Greek, followed him, and their hands fell still upon the bolts of fabric. “What is it, Odo?” he called. The Norman French that he used here rang harsh in his ears. “Did you meet trouble on your errand?”

The slender form stumbled into his arms, the face pressed against his robe. He felt the shuddering. “Master,” sobbed at him, “the king is dead. I heard—they are crying it from mouth to mouth through the city—”

Volstrup’s embrace dropped away. He looked outward. You couldn’t see much through the grilles over the arched windows. The door was still agape, though. Cobblestones, an arcaded building opposite, a Saracen passing by in white cloak and turban, sparrows fluttering up from some scrap of food, none of it seemed real any longer. Why should it? Whatever he saw could at any instant cease ever having been. Everything around him could. He himself.

“Our King Roger? No,” he denied. “Impossible. A false rumor.”

Odo drew back and flailed a wild gesture. “It’s true!” His voice cracked across. The shame of that steadied him a little. He swallowed, swiped at tears, tried to straighten. “Messengers from Italy. He fell in battle. His army is broken. They say the prince is dead too.”

“But I know—” Volstrup’s tongue locked in his mouth. Appalled, he realized that he had been about to describe the future until his conditioning stopped him. Had this tale shaken him so badly? “How would people in the street know? Such news would go straight to the palace.”

“The m-messengers—they called it out as they passed by—”

A sound broke through the noises of Palermo, overrode them, strode between the city walls and out the harbor to the bay. Volstrup knew that voice. All did. It was the bells of the cathedral. They were tolling.

For a moment he stood motionless. At the edge of vision he saw the apprentices at the workbench cross themselves, the Catholic left to right, the Orthodox right to left. It came to him that he had better do likewise. That broke his paralysis. He turned to the Greek lad, the most levelheaded. “Michael,” he ordered, “speed forth, learn what has indeed happened, as nearly as you can in a short time, and come tell me.”

“Yes, master,” the apprentice replied. “They should be giving out the news publicly soon.” He left.

“Back to your work, Cosimo,” Volstrup went on. “Join him, Odo. Never mind what I sent you for. I’ll not want it today.”

As he sought the rear of the shop he heard a racket rising beneath the clang and jangle of the bells. It wasn’t talk, song, footfalls, hoofbeats, wheel-creak, the city’s pulsebeat. It was shouts, screams, prayers—Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, a score of vernaculars, dismay that wailed in this neighborhood and everywhere else. Ja, det er nok sandt. He noticed that his mind had gone back to Danish. The story was probably true. If so, he alone understood in full how terrible it was.

Unless the cause of it also did.

He came out into a small garden court with a water basin, cloistered in Moorish style. This house had been built when the Saracens ruled Sicily. After purchasing it, he had adapted it to his business and to the fact that he would maintain no harem, unlike most of those Normans who could afford to. Now the other sides of the enclosure gave on storerooms, kitchen, dormitories for apprentices and servants, and similar utility. A stair led to the upper story, living quarters for himself, his wife, and their three children. He climbed it.

She met him on the gallery, a small, dark woman, gone plump and her hair, black beneath its covering, streaked with gray, nevertheless rather attractive. He had looked at her middle years before returning to her youth and asking for her hand. That skirted the law of the Time Patrol, but he’d spend a long while with her. He needed a wife for appearance’s sake, for family connections, to maintain his household and, yes, warm his bed; by temperament he was a benedict, not a womanizer.

“What is it, my lord?” Her question quavered in Greek. Like most Sicilians born, she got along in several languages, but today she fell back to that of her childhood. Me too, he thought. “What is happening?”

“Bad news, I fear,” he answered. “See that the children and the staff stay calm.”

Though she had become a Catholic in order to marry him, she forgot and crossed herself in Eastern wise. Just the same, he admired the steadiness that came upon her. “As my lord bids.”

It made him smile, squeeze her arm, and say, “Fear not for us, Zoe. I will see to things.”

“I know you will.” She hastened off. His gaze followed her a moment. There passed through him: If only the centuries of Muslim rule hadn’t made women of every faith so submissive, what a companion she might be. But she handled her duties well, her kinfolk remained helpful to his business, and … he couldn’t have anybody who wanted to share his secrets.

He crossed a couple of rooms still furnished in the austere, airy Islamic style, and reached the one that was his alone. It wasn’t kept locked; that might have raised suspicions of witchcraft or worse. However, a merchant naturally required confidential files, strongboxes, and occasional privacy. Barring the door behind him, he drew up a stool in front of a large ambry, sat down, and pressed the foliate pattern carved into the wood in a certain order.

A rectangle of luminance sprang forth before him. He ran tongue over dry lips and whispered in Temporal, “Give me a synopsis of King Roger’s campaign in Italy from, uh, the beginning of last month and onward.”

Text flashed. Memory supplied what had gone before. A year ago, Lothair, the old Holy Roman Emperor, had crossed the Alps to aid Pope Innocent II against Roger II, King of Capua, Apulia, and Sicily. High among their allies was Rogers brother-in-law Rainulf, Count of Avellino. They fought their way far down the Italian peninsula until at the end of August, Anno Domini 1137, they reckoned themselves victorious. Rainulf was created Duke of Apulia, to hold the South against the Sicilian. Lothair left him eight hundred knights and, feeling death nigh, started homeward. Innocent entered Rome although his rival claimant to the throne of St. Peter, Anacletus II, occupied the Castel Sant’ Angelo.

At the beginning of this October, Roger did return. He landed at Salerno and laid waste the lands that had repudiated their allegiance to him; the savagery of his vengeance was a shock even to this brutal age. At the very end of the month, he met Rainulf’s army at Rignano in northern Apulia.

There he suffered defeat. His first charge, under the captaincy of his eldest son and namesake, Duke Roger, carried the enemy before it. The second one, which he himself led, faltered and failed. Duke Rainulf, a gallant and well-beloved leader, threw his whole force against the king’s men. Panic seized them and they fled, save for three thousand whom they left slain. Roger took the remnants of them back to Salerno.

The victory availed little. Roger had other forces at his beck. They besieged Naples and regained Benevento and the great abbey on Monte Cassino. Before long, only Apulia remained to its new duke. Innocent, with his famous partisan Bernard of Clairvaux, must needs agree to let Roger mediate the dispute with Anacletus. Although the anti-Pope was on his side, the king shrewdly declared that he found the case too deep for quick decision. Let there be a further conference in Palermo.

It was never held. Emperor Lothair died in December, on his way home. In January 1138, Anacletus also slipped from life. Roger got a new Pope elected, but this one soon ended the schism by laying down his tiara. Triumphant in Rome, Innocent set about destroying the king, whom he had already excommunicated. He did not succeed. His foremost surviving ally, Rainulf, died of a fever in the spring of 1139; shortly afterward, the elder and younger Rogers ambushed the papal army and took Innocent himself prisoner.

So much for the Middle Ages, when all men were devout sons of Mother Church, gibed the Lutheran in Volstrup’s past. Immediately, shocked, he recalled: But I’ve let the record run on into the future. I sit here in early November, 1137.

That fits. So much time is just right for word to reach Roger’s capital that he did not merely suffer a reversal at Rignano, he was killed.

Then what becomes of that morrow in which he was to play so mighty a role?

He bade the text stop. For a moment he sat chilled and stinking with sweat. Resolution came. He was—he believed—the only time traveler now on the island; but he was not unique on the planet.

His was scarcely a Patrol base. He was an observer, who also gave assistance and guidance to whatever travelers might arrive. Not many did. The glory days of Norman Sicily were yet to come; and after them, events on the mainland would swallow it up. Headquarters for this entire milieu were in Rome, commencing in 1198, when Innocent III took over the Papacy. But all Europe was astir, and beyond Europe all the world. No matter how desperately thinly they were spread, Patrol agents were trying to monitor its history.

Aided occasionally by the databank, Volstrup ran his mind across the globe. At this moment, Lothair was still on his way back to Germany; strife over the succession would follow his death, becoming civil war. Louis VII had just inherited the crown of France and married Eleanor of Aquitaine; his reign would be largely a series of disastrous blunders. In England, the contest between Stephen and Matilda was growing violent. In Iberia, an ex-monk had been forced against his will to become King of Aragon, but it would lead to union with Catalonia; Alfonso VII of Castile was proclaiming himself Emperor of all Spaniards and proceeding with the reconquista. Poor Denmark, under a weakling lord, lay ravaged by pagan raiders from across the Baltic….

John II ruled ably over the East Roman Empire; he was campaigning in Asia Minor, hoping to win Antioch back from the Crusaders. The Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem was hard pressed by resurgent Muslims. Yet the Caliphate in Egypt was divided against itself, Arabia had split into a welter of petty realms, and Persia was in the throes of dynastic war.

The principalities of Kievan Russia were likewise at odds with each other. Eastward, the Muslim conquest of India had stalled while Mahmud’s family fought the Afghan princes. The Kin Tatars were conquering northern China and had established their own imperium there, while the Sung rulers hung on in the South. The feud between Taira and Minamoto clans tore Japan apart. In the Americas—

A knock sounded. Volstrup lurched to his feet and unbarred the door. Michael stood atremble. “It is true, Master Geoffrey,” the apprentice said. “King Roger and his son fell in battle at a place called Rignano, in Apulia. The bodies were not recovered. Couriers sped here from what was left of the army. They say that every part of Italy they passed through is falling away again, ready to open itself to Duke Rainulf. Master, are you ill?”

“I am grieved, of course,” Volstrup mumbled. “Go back to your work. I will rejoin you presently. We must carry on with our lives.”

Can we?

Alone again, he opened a locked coffer. Within it lay a pair of metal cylinders, smoothly tapered, about the length of his forearm. He knelt and ran fingers across the controls of one. His timecycle was concealed outside the city, but these tubes would carry messages to wherever and whenever he commanded.

If that destination exists.

He rasped his news at the recording unit. “Please inform me of the actual situation and of what I should do,” he finished. He set the goal for milieu headquarters in Rome, the time somewhat arbitrarily for this same date in 1200. By then, yonder office should be well organized and familiar with its surroundings, while not yet preoccupied with such crises and disasters as the Latin conquest of Constantinople.

He touched a point on the shell. The cylinder vanished. Air popped. Please come back soon, he begged. Please bring comfort.

It reappeared. His hands were shaking too much for him to activate the displays. “V-v-verbal report,” he stammered.

The synthetic voice uttered his nightmare for him. “There was no establishment to receive me. Nothing reached me on any Patrol communication channel. As policy directs, I have returned.”

“I see.” Volstrup’s tone was more flat and small. He rose. The Time Patrol no longer guards the future, he knew. It never did. My parents, brothers, sisters, old friends, youthful sweetheart, homeland, none of what shaped me will ever be. I am a Crusoe in time.

And then: No. Whoever else among us was pastward of the fatal hour, they are still there and then, as I am. We must find each other, join together, seek for some way to restore what has been destroyed.

How?

A little resolution stirred within his numbness. He did have his communication devices. He could call around the world of today. Afterward—He couldn’t think beyond that, not at once. This wasn’t for an ordinary corpsman like him. Nobody less than a Danellian would know what to do. Or if the Danellians were gone, annulled, then maybe an Unattached agent—if any were left—

Emil Volstrup shook himself, like a man come out of surf that has nearly drowned him, and got busy.

1765 B. C—15,926 B. C—1765 B. C.

A breath of autumn went over the foothills. Chill rang in streams hurrying down slopes and before sunrise laid hoarfrost on grass. Here forest had broken apart into stands of timber, large or small; fir remained dark but ash was yellowing and oak showed early touches of brown. Outbound birds passed aloft in huge flocks, swan, goose, lesser fowl. Stag challenged stag. Southward the Caucasus walled heaven with snowpeaks.

The camp of the Bakhri boiled. Folk struck tents, loaded wagons, hitched oxen to those and horses to chariots while youngsters with dogs rounded up the herds. They were on their way to winter in the lowlands. Yet King Thuliash accompanied the wanderer Denesh a little distance, so that they could bid each other a quiet farewell.

“It is not only that there is something secret about you, and surely you have powers not given to most,” he said earnestly. He was a tall man, auburn of hair and beard, lighter-skinned than most of his followers. Clad in ordinary wise, fur-trimmed tunic, trousers, leggings, he carried on his shoulder a bronze-headed battle-ax trimmed with gold bands. “It is that I have come to like you, and wish you would stay longer among us.”

Denesh smiled. Lean, thin-faced, gray-haired, hazel-eyed, he topped the other by two hands’ breadth. Nevertheless he clearly was not of the Aryas, who lifetimes ago made themselves masters of the tribes throughout these parts. Nor had he pretended to be. He related nothing of himself save that he fared in search of wisdom. “They were good months, and I thank you,” he replied, “but I have told you and the elders that once more my god beckons me.”

Thuliash made sign of respect. “Then I ask Indra the Thunderer that he bid his warrior Maruts watch over you for as far as their range may reach; and I shall cherish the gifts you brought, the tales you told, the songs you sang for us.”

Denesh dipped his own ax. “Fare you ever well, O King, and all who spring from your loins.”

He stepped up into his chariot, which had jounced slowly along beside them. His driver was already there, a young man who must belong to a native breed—stocky, big-nosed, hairy—but who had been taciturn while he and his master abode with the Bakhri. At a shout, the two horses trotted off, slantwise across the hillside toward the heights.

Thuliash stood watching until the chariot was gone from sight. He did not fear for them. Game was plentiful, highlanders were hospitable, and wild men would not likely attack when the pair went equipped like the northern conquerors. Besides, although Denesh had made no show of powers, he was clearly a wizard. If only he had stayed … the Bakhri might well have changed their minds and crossed the mountains…. Thuliash sighed, hefted his weapon, returned to camp. There would be fighting enough in years ahead. The tribes owing tribute to him were growing too big for their pasturelands. He would presently lead half of them around the inland sea and thence eastward to win themselves a new country.

—Neither aboard the chariot spoke much. Keeping their balance as it rocked and swayed had become automatic, but they were suddenly overwhelmed by memories, thoughts, hope tinged the least bit with regret. After an hour they came onto a ridge, a realm of wind and loneliness. “This will do,” Keith Denison said in English.

Agop Mikelian drew rein. The team snorted wearily. Light though the vehicle was, pulling it on such terrain, long before horse collars were invented, or stirrups and horseshoes for that matter, wore them down fast. “Poor beasts, we should have stopped sooner,” he said.

“We had to be sure nobody was watching,” Denison reminded him. He sprang to the ground. “Ah, this feels almost as good as homecoming will.” He saw the look on Mikelian. “I’m sorry. I forgot.”

“That’s all right, sir.” His assistant came down likewise. “I’ve got places to go to.” The Patrol recruited him in 1908, following the massacre at Van. Helping trace the dim origins of the Armenian people heartened him to live with their history. Resilient, he grinned. “Like California in the 1930s, trading on William Saroyan’s publicity.”

Denison nodded. “I remember you telling me.” They hadn’t had much chance to get acquainted, as busy as their job kept them. Personnel—total available lifespans—were so few, to map a field so vast as the migrations of the early Indo-Europeans. Yet the task was vital. Without a record of them, how could the Patrol guard events that had shaken the world and shaped the future? Denison and his new helper went straight to work.

Still, he thought, the fellow had proved steady and intelligent. Having gained experience, he could take a more active part in the next expedition.

“Where’d you say you’re bound for, sir?” Mikelian asked.

“Paris, 1980. Got a heavy date with my wife.”

“Why just then? I mean, didn’t you tell me she’s an attached agent in her own birthtime, closer to the middle twentieth century?”

Denison laughed. “You forget the problems longevity brings. Somebody who didn’t grow visibly older in the course of several decades would cause her friends and neighbors to wonder about her. Cynthia was winding up our affairs when I left, prior to moving away. She’s to begin a new identity—same name, might as well, but different location—in 1981. And me in my persona as her peripatetic anthropologist husband, of course. How better for us to segue into the manners and mores of a later generation than by taking a twelve-month holiday amongst them, and where better to start than Paris?”

And, by God, I’ve earned it, he thought. She too, yes, yes. The time between my leaving and my return will have been much shorter for her than it was for me, and she’ll have had her clerical duties in the Patrol to keep her mind occupied, as well as making our move away from New York plausible to our acquaintances there. Still, she’ll have worried, and chafed at the rule that she mustn’t skip ahead those few weeks to make sure I do come back alive. (Even so slight a loop in causality could breed trouble. Not likely, but it could, and we must often take chances as is, without adding needlessly to the hazard. How well I know. Oh, how very well.) But I have roved for more than a quarter year among those herdsmen.

Sun, stars, and campfire smoke, rain, lightning, and a river in spate, wolves, stampede, and a cattle raid, song, saga, and ancestral epic, birth, death, and blood sacrifice, comradeship, contests, and lovemaking—Cynthia didn’t ask about more than he chose to tell. He knew that, beneath her silence, she had guessed there was somebody in an ancient Persia whose history had been subtly altered. He’d been working ever since on putting Cassandane behind him. But months away from home added up, and if he’d declined Thuliash’s kindly offer he might never have gained the king’s confidence, which it was necessary for him to do, and—And he wished little Ferya all the best in her nomad world, and this second honeymoon in Paris should bring him back closer to Cynthia, whom the Lord knew was a dear and valiant lady—

His exuberance had faded. He lifted the ax that marked him as of warrior class, worthy to speak with chieftains. It was also a communicator. “Specialist Keith Denison calling milieu headquarters, Babylon,” he said in Temporal. “Hello, hello. Talk freely; my associate and I are alone.”

The air crackled: “Greeting, Agent. Glad to hear from you. We were growing worried.”

“Yes, I’d planned to get away a little sooner, but they wanted me to take part in their equinox rite and I couldn’t well refuse.”

“Equinox? A pastoral society keeping a solar calendar?”

“Well, this particular tribe observes the quarter days—which is a possibly useful datum. Can you fetch us? We have a chariot and two horses, Patrol stock.”

“At once, Agent. Only let me get a fix on your location.”

Mikelian danced in the grass. “Home!” he caroled.

A carrier appeared, no hopper but a large cylinder that hovered on antigravity a few inches above ground. It hadn’t skipped through time, merely across space. Four men in Mesopotamian costume of the period, complete with curled beards, emerged. Quickly, they got team and vehicle aboard. Everybody embarked, the pilot took his seat, the Caucasus Mountains blinked from sight.

What appeared in the viewscreens was a plain where grass billowed to the horizon. Tree-shaded, a set of timber buildings and a corral stood nearby. Two women clad for rough work hastened to greet the newcomers. They took charge of Denison’s transportation. The Patrol could safely maintain a ranch in North America before humans arrived. Mikelian patted the horses an affectionate goodbye. Maybe he’d get the same ones on his next trip.

The carrier jumped again. It emerged in a secret vault below the Babylon where Hammurabi still reigned.

The director of the base met the anthropologists and invited them to dine. They’d be here a couple of days, downloading the information they had gathered. Most was of purely scientific interest, but what was the Patrol for if not to serve civilization in every possible way? Too bad that the knowledge couldn’t be made public for thousands of years, after time travel had been developed, Denison thought. Meanwhile scholars would exhaust their lives following merely archaeological clues, often onto wholly false trails…. It wasn’t for nothing. Their labors carved a bridgehead from which Patrol Specialists launched the real quests.

Over the dinner table, he related those of his findings that were operationally significant. “Thuliash and his confederation will not cross the mountains. They’ll be migrating east instead. So he won’t augment Gandash’s forces on this side, and I believe that is why the Kassites don’t make any more gains against the Babylonians, nineteen years from now, than history records.”

“Which means we have a somewhat less complicated military-political situation to keep track of than I feared,” said the director. “Excellent. Great work.” Obviously he was thinking of lifespan released to mount guard over other potential trouble spots.

He arranged for his guests to tour the city, properly disguised and under close guidance. It was Mikelian’s first time, and Denison always found such a visit interesting. Nevertheless eagerness seethed in them, and release at last was joy.

They got shaves and haircuts at the base. It didn’t keep twentieth-century clothes in stock, but their field outfits were durable, comfortable, pungent in a clean outdoor way that evoked a lot of memories. “I’d like to keep mine for a souvenir,” Mikelian said.

“You’ll probably want it again for use,” Denison told him. “Unless our next assignment is to a very different region, and I don’t expect that. You would like to join me, wouldn’t you?”

“Would I ever, sir!” Tears stood forth in the brown young eyes. Mikelian wrung his hand, leaped aboard a hopper, waved, and vanished.

Denison selected one for himself from among those that waited in the whitely lit garage. “God be with you, Agent,” said the attendant. He was a twenty-first-century Iraqi. The Patrol tried to match somatotypes to eras, and race changes far more slowly than language or faith.

“Thank you, Hassan. Likewise.”

Having mounted, for a moment Denison sat half adream. He’d arrive in a cavern little different from this, register, obtain garments and money and passport and whatever else he needed, then walk from the office building that fronted for the Patrol yonder, forth onto the Boulevard Voltaire, Saturday morning, the tenth of May, most beautiful of all Parisian months…. Traffic would be frantic, but in 1980 the city hadn’t yet suffered its full monstrous overgrowth…. The hotel where Cynthia was to make a reservation and meet him stood on the Left Bank, a charming, slightly dilapidated anachronism where croissants for breakfast were fresh-baked on the premises and the staff liked guests who were lovers….

He set for his destination and touched the main switch.

1980 α A. D.

Daylight flooded him.

Daylight?

Shock froze his hands on the control bars. As if by a lightning flash at night, he saw a narrow street, high-peaked walls, a crowd that howled and recoiled in pandemonium from him, the women all wore dark ankle-length gowns and kept their heads covered, the men had some color to long coats and baggy pants, the air was full of smoke and barnyard smells—As instantaneously he knew that no vault existed and his machine, built not to arrive within solid matter, had brought him to the surface of some place that was not his Paris—

Get out of here!

Untrained for combat missions, he reacted half a second too slowly. A man in blue leaped, tackled him around the waist, dragged him from the saddle. Denison had barely time and drilled-in reflex to hit the emergency go-button. A vehicle must never, under no circumstances whatsoever, fall into outsider possession. His disappeared. He and his assailant tumbled to the pavement.

“God damn it, stop that!” Denison did know martial arts, they were part of his Patrol education. The blue-clad man got fingers on his throat. Denison struck the edge of his palm into the neck, under the angle of the jaw. His attacker gasped and sagged, a dead weight upon him. Denison could breathe anew. The rags of darkness cleared from his eyes. He scrambled free and onto his feet.

Again too late. The civilians stumbled over each other to get clear—through the general yelling he made out “sorcier!” and “juif vengeur!”—but another man in blue rode a well-trained horse through the midst of them. Denison saw boots, short cape, flat helmet, yes, some kind of trooper or policeman. Mostly he saw a sidearm drawn and pointed at him. He saw, in the clean-shaven face behind, the fear that can kill.

He raised his hands.

The trooper put whistle to mouth and shrilled thrice. Thereafter he shouted for order and silence. Denison followed his words with difficulty and gaps. They weren’t any French he knew, different accent and a lot of what seemed to be English, though this wasn’t franglais either, he thought dazedly: “Calm! Control yourselves! I have him arrested…. The saints…. Almighty God…. His Majesty—”

I’m trapped, hammered in Denison. Worse than I was in Persia. That was at least rightful history. This—

Surprisingly fast, the near panic died down. People stood where they were and stared. They crossed themselves repeatedly and muttered prayers. The man whom Denison had hit groaned back into consciousness. More mounties showed up. Two bore some kind of carbines, though no firearm was familiar to the prisoner. They surrounded him. “Declarezz vos nomm,” barked one with a silver eagle on his breast. “Quhat e vo? Faite quick!”

Sickness closed Denison’s gullet. I am lost, Cynthia is, the world is. He could only mumble. A trooper unhooked a billy from his belt and stuck him with cruel precision across the spine. He reeled. The officer reached a decision and barked an order.

Turned stiffly silent, they marched him off. It was a walk of about a mile. Shambling at first, he regained a blurred alertness on the way and began to look around him. Hemmed in by the riders, he couldn’t get more than glimpses, but they told him something. The streets he went on were constricted and twisting, though smoothly enough paved. No buildings stood higher than six or seven stories and most seemed centuries old, many of them half-timbered and with leaded windowpanes. Pedestrians were numerous, brisk, men often animated as he remembered from his France but women subdued, decorous. Children were few; were they generally in school? Once away from the scene of action, the party drew little more than glances, now and then a sign of the cross; were captives an everyday sight? Horses pulled wagons and an occasional ornate carriage, leaving their droppings behind them. When he reached the bank of the Seine, he saw barges tugged by twenty-oared rowboats.

From there, too, he spied Notre Dame. But it wasn’t the cathedral he remembered. It seemed to cover nearly half the island, a mountain of soot-gray stone soaring up and up and up, tier upon tier, tower above tower, like a Christian ziggurat, till the topmost spires raked heaven a thousand feet aloft. What ambition had replaced the lovely Gothic with this?

He forgot it when the squad brought him to another building, massive and fortress-like above the river. A life-size crucifix was carved over the main door. Within were gloom, chill, more guards, and men in hooded black robes, bearing rosaries and pectoral crosses, whom he took for monks or lay clergy of some kind. His awareness continued vague, as stunned and heartsick as he felt. Not until he was alone in a cell did he come fully conscious.

The room was tiny, dark, its concrete walls bedewed. Light straggled in from the corridor, through the locked and iron-barred door. The furniture was a pallet, with a thin blanket, on the floor, and a chamber pot that he found, dimly surprised, was rubber. Well, he could have used a hard one for a weapon. A cross was chiseled into the ceiling.

Christ, I’m thirsty. Can’t I even have a cup of water? He clutched the bars, strained against them, called his hoarse appeal. For answer, somebody gibed from another cell somewhere down the passage. “Stop hoping, will ye? Leave me be!” English, by God, though strangely accented. When Denison replied in that language, he got an inarticulate snarl.

He slumped down on the mattress. What he’d just heard boded ill. Well, he did have time to think, try to prepare himself for interrogation. He’d better start. The decision strengthened him. Presently he was upright again, pacing.

Perhaps two hours had passed when a turnkey opened the door to admit a pair of guards, hands on pistol butts, and a cleric. The blackrobe was an old man, wrinkled, blinking, but sharp. “Loquerisne latine?” he demanded.

Do I speak Latin? Denison realized. Sure, that’d still be a universal second language in this world. How I wish I did. Never thought I’d need it, in my line of work, and nothing is left from high school but “amo, amas, amat.” The image of little old Miss Walsh rose before him. “I told you so,” she said. He choked back a hysterical laugh and shook his head. “Non, monsieur, je le regrette,” he attempted in French.

“Ah, vo parlezz alorss fransay?”

Denison formed his words slowly, with care: “I seem to speak another French than yours, reverend father. I come from far away.” He must repeat himself twice, trying what synonyms occurred to him, before he got his meaning across.

Withered lips quirked humorlessly. “That is clear, if you do not so much as recognize a friar. Know, I am Brother Matiou of the Dominican order and the Holy Inquisition.”

When Denison had understood, fear grabbed his guts. He kept it leashed and slogged ahead. “There has been an unfortunate accident. I assure you, I am on a mission peaceful although of the utmost importance. I arrived untimely and in the wrong place. It is understandable if this aroused fears and caused precautions to be taken. But if you will bring me to your highest authority”—king, Pope, what the hell?—“I will explain the situation to him.”

Again unraveling was necessary before Matiou snapped, “You will explain here and now. Think not that demonic art can avail you in Christ’s own stronghold. Declare your name!”

The Patrolman got the drift. “Keith Denison, your Rev—uh, Brother.” Why not? What did it matter? What did anything matter anymore?

Matiou was also catching on, quickly interpreting otherwise unintelligible bits from context. “Ah, of England?” He used that word, not “Angleterre,” and went on: “We can fetch one who speaks the patois, if that will make you answer more readily.”

“No, my home is—Brother, I cannot give the secrets I bear to anyone less than the supremacy.”

Matiou glared. “You will speak to me, and speak truth. Must we put you to the full question? Then, believe me, when you go to the stake you will bless him who lights the fire.”

He needed three attempts before he conveyed his threat. The full question? I suppose less extreme torture is routine. This is only a preliminary quiz. Fear keened in Denison’s brain. He was faintly astonished at his firmness: “With respect, Brother, my duty, sworn before God, forbids me to reveal certain things to anyone but the sovereign. It would be catastrophic, did the knowledge become public. Think of small children given fire to play with.” He cast a significant look at the guards. The effect was spoiled by the need to repeat.

Response was clear: “The Inquisition knows well how to keep silent.”

“I do not doubt that. But neither do I doubt that the master will be most displeased should word intended for him alone be uttered elsewhere.”

Matiou scowled. Denison saw hesitation underneath and pressed his advantage. They were catching on to each other’s French rather fast. Part of the trick was to talk somewhat like an American who had read but never heard the language.

Confronted with something unprecedented like this, the monk wouldn’t be human if he didn’t welcome an excuse to pass the buck. After all, Denison argued, the sovereign could always remand him for interrogation.

“What do you mean by the sovereign?” Matiou asked. “The Holy Father? Then why did you not come to Rome?”

“Well, the king—”

“The king?”

Denison realized he’d made a mistake. Apparently the monarch, if they had one, was not on top. He hastened on: “The king, I was about to say, would be the natural person to see in certain countries.”

“Yes, among the Russian barbarians. Or in those lands of black Mahound where they acknowledge no caliph.” Matiou’s gnarled forefingers stabbed. “Where were you truly bound, Keith Denison?”

“To Paris, in France. This is Paris, isn’t it? Please let me finish. I seek the highest ecclesiastical authority in … these domains. Was I wrong? Is he not in the city?”

“The archcardinal?” Matiou breathed, while the expression on the guards shifted from nervous to awed.

Denison nodded vigorously. “Of course, the archcardinal.” What kind of rank was that?

Matiou looked away. Beads on his rosary clicked between his fingers. After a while that became very long to the listener, he clipped: “We shall see. Conduct yourself carefully. You will remain under observation.” His robe swirled as he swung about and departed.

Denison sank onto his pallet, wrung out. Well, he thought faintly, I’ve won a little time before they take me to the rack and thumbscrews, or whatever worse they’ve invented since the Middle Ages. Unless I’ve somehow landed—No, can’t be.

When a jailer with an armed escort brought him bread, water, and greasy stew, he inquired about the date. “St. Anton’s, in the year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and eighty” drove the last nail into the coffin for him.

From despair he drew at length a bleak determination. Something might turn up yet, rescue or—No, to think of oblivion was not only useless, it could paralyze him. Better to keep going, always ready to jump at whatever piece of luck chanced by.

Shivering through the night on his inadequate bed, he tried to lay plans. They were inevitably tentative. What he must do was get the protection of the big boss, the dictator, the—whatever an archcardinal was. That meant convincing the man he was not dangerous but, instead, potentially valuable, or at any rate interesting. He could not reveal himself as a time traveler. The Patrol inhibition would freeze his larynx. Anyway, quite probably no one in this world could comprehend the truth. However, he could scarcely deny having appeared out of thin air, though he might claim that witnesses were confused about details. Things Matiou had let fall suggested a belief in magic, even among educated people. But he should proceed most cautiously if he tried an explanation along those lines. They had enough technology here to produce efficient-looking small arms, and doubtless artillery. The rubber pot indicated contact with the New World on a regular basis, which implied a sufficient knowledge of astronomy for navigation if nothing else—Would you believe a visitor from Mars?

Denison coughed a chuckle. Nevertheless, that kind of story looked less unpromising than others. He must feel his way forward. “First let me humbly inquire what the savants among your Sanctity’s (?) flock assume to be the case. My nation has perhaps made discoveries they have not.” Awkward communication, frequent pauses to figure out what a sentence had meant, would be immensely helpful, giving him opportunities to think and to retrieve any faux pas….

He fell into uneasy, dream-ridden sleep.

In the morning, a while after he’d received a bowl of gruel, guards accompanied by a priest took him away. What he glimpsed in an adjacent cell chilled his sweat. He was merely brought to a tiled room where a tub of hot water steamed, and told to bathe himself well. Afterward he was issued a dark set of present-day male clothes, his wrists were manacled, and he was led into an office where Brother Matiou sat behind a desk beneath a crucifix.

“Thank God and your patron saint, if you have one, that his Venerability, Albin Archcardinal Fil-Johan, Grand Duke of the Northern Provinces, graciously consents to see you,” the friar intoned.

“I do, I do.” Denison crossed himself two-handedly. “I will make many thank offerings as soon as I am able.”

“Since you are a foreigner, indeed more foreign than a pagan from Tartary or Mexique, first I shall give you some instruction, that you not squander too grossly his Venerability’s time.”

Hey, a break! Denison paid his closest heed. He sensed how shrewdly Matiou extracted nibbles of information from him in the course of the hour, but that was all right; it was a chance to rehearse and develop his story.

And at last he was brought in a closed carriage to a palace atop that hill called Montmartre in the lost world, and ushered through sumptuous corridors and up a grand staircase and past a gilt bronze door where bas-reliefs showed Biblical scenes; and he found himself in a high white room, where sunlight streamed through stained glass onto an Oriental carpet, and confronting him sat a man on a throne, in a robe of scarlet and gold.

As ordered, Denison prostrated himself. “You may be seated,” said a deep voice. The archcardinal was middle-aged but vigorous. The consciousness of power seemed engraved on his countenance. Spectacles diminished his dignity not at all. Just the same, he was clearly intrigued, prepared to question and to listen.

“I thank your Venerability.” Denison took the chair, some twenty feet from the throne. They weren’t allowing needless risks at this private audience. A bellpull hung by the prelate’s right hand.

“You may simply call me ‘lord,’”—the English word—Albin told him. “We have much to speak of, you and I.” Sternly: “Beware of attempting tricks or subtleties. There are ample grounds already for suspicion. Know, the Chief Inquisitor, the superior of that cleric you have met, urges me to order you to the flames at once, before you wreak harm. He feels a magician such as this can only be an Avenging Jew.”

Denison understood enough to breathe, “A … a what, lord?” from a throat suddenly going dry.

Albin raised his brows. “You do not know?”

“No, lord. Believe me, I am from a land so remote that—”

“Yet you know something of our language, and claim to bear a message for me.”

Yeah, I’m up against a first-class intellect. “A message of goodwill, lord, in hopes of establishing closer relations. Our knowledge of you is slight, from visions vouchsafed prophets ancient and modern. Unhappily, I suffered shipwreck. No, I am certainly not an Avenging Jew, whatever that may be.”

Albin too grasped the general intent, if not every word. His mouth tightened. “The Jews are skilled craftsmen and engineers at the very least, and it is quite possible that they also command black arts. They are descendants of those who escaped when our forefathers scoured Europe clean of their kind. They settled among the worshippers of Mahound, and now they lend their help to them. Have you not even heard that Austria has fallen to those paynim? That the heretic legions of the Russian emperor are at the gates of Berlin?”

And the Inquisition busy in western Christendom. God! I believed my twentieth century was pretty grim.

18,244 B. C.

I

Later Manse Everard thought the fact that he was chosen, and precisely where and how it happened to him, would be ironic were the coincidence not so absurd. Later yet he remembered his conversations with Guion, and wondered mightily.

But they were more distant than the stars from his mind when the summons came upon him. He and Wanda Tamberly had been sharing a vacation at the lodge the Patrol maintained in the Pleistocene Pyrenees. On this their last day, they left off skiing and climbing, nor did they flit north to seek out the magnificent wildlife of a glacial era, nor call on any of the nearby Crô-Magnon settlements to enjoy picturesque hospitality. They simply went for a long walk on easy trails, looked at mountain scenery, said little, were aware of much.

Sunset washed gold across white peaks and ridges. The lodge stood at no great altitude, but snowline was lower than in the birthtime of these two. Timberline was also; around them reached alpine meadow, intensely green, flecked with small summer flowers. A little way upslope, several ibex lifted horns and watched them, alertly but without fear. The sky, greenish in the west, deepening through azure overhead to purple in the east, was full of homebound wings. Cries drifted down through silence and gathering chill. Human hunters had made scant mark thus far; they were almost in balance with nature, like wolf and cave lion. The air tasted of purity.

The main building loomed ahead, a darkness from which windows glowed. “It’s been grand,” Everard said in American English. “For me, anyhow.”

“Ditto,” Tamberly replied. “You’ve been so kind, taking a rookie like me in hand and getting me to feel easy here.”

“Shucks, a pleasure. Besides, you’re the naturalist. You introduced me to stuff in the wilderness I’d never heard or dreamed of.” Including hunts for mammoth, reindeer, wild horse with camera rather than gun. Born and raised when she was, Wanda disapproved of blood sports. His background had been different.

Not that such details mattered a lot otherwise if you were in the Patrol. Except—She hasn’t added but four or five years to the twenty-one that were hers when first we met. How many have I? Longevity treatments or no, Everard didn’t care, just then, to reckon them up.

“I wish—” She gulped and looked aside. Finally, in a rush: “I wish I weren’t leaving.”

His pulse stumbled. “You don’t have to, you know,” he said.

“Yes. I really must. I’ve such limited lifespan to give my folks,” parents, sister, who would never know that she fared through the ages, whose own years above ground would number less than a hundred and all on world lines running straight from conception to dissolution. “And then I should, I want to, call on Steve,” her uncle who was also a Patrol agent, in Victorian England. “Before I go back to work.” She could have spent years of experienced time on vacation, then reported to her base camp within minutes of the moment she left it; but agents didn’t do that sort of thing. You owed the outfit a fair proportion of your existence. Besides, too long away from the job, you’d go stale, and that could prove fatal, to yourself or, worse, a comrade.

“Okay, I understand,” Everard sighed. He plunged at the question they had skirted this whole while. “Can we make another date?”

She laughed and caught his hand. How warm hers was. “Why, sure.” Her glance turned toward his. In the fading light he couldn’t see the blue of her eyes. Strong bones stood forth, though, and page-bobbed hair bore the hue of amber. She was shorter than he by the breadth of his palm, and he was a big man. “To tell the truth, I was hoping. Didn’t want to get pushy. Don’t tell me you felt shy!”

“M-m, well—” He had never been glib. How could he now explain? It wasn’t quite clear to him, anyway. The gap between our ranks, I guess. I’m afraid of seeming to condescend, or else of seeming to be trying to overwhelm. Her generation of women grew up with a touchy kind of pride built in. “Old bachelor type. You, you’ve got a wide field to play if you want.” She had frankly enjoyed the attention paid her by other male guests. And they were exotic to her, several of them handsome and vivacious, while he was only another twentieth-century American, slow-spoken, plain in his tastes, war-battered in the face.

“Foof,” she snorted. “You’ve cut a wider swathe than any field I’m ever likely to find myself in. Don’t deny it. You wouldn’t be normal if you hadn’t taken advantage of opportunities.”

And you? … None of my business.

“Not that you’ve ever abused your chances,” she added hastily. “I know you never would. I was surprised and, and delighted when you stayed in touch after Beringia. For Pete’s sake, did you think I didn’t want to?”

Almost, he grabbed her. Would she like me to? By God, I believe she would. But no. It would be wrong. She was too wholehearted. Let her first become clear in her mind about this. Yes, and let him decide what his foremost wishes and needs were.

Be grateful for what you’ve had, this past couple of weeks, son. He knotted the fist she wasn’t holding and muttered, “Fine. Fine. Where might you like to go next?” To get better acquainted.

She also seemed to take refuge in banality. “Gee, I’d have to think. Suggestions?”

Then they were at the lodge, mounting its veranda, entering the common room. Flames crackled in a huge stone fireplace. A rack of Irish elk antlers curved above it. On the opposite wall, cast in brass, a heraldic shield bore a stylized hourglass. It was the emblem of the Patrol, the insigne on uniforms that were seldom worn. Folk lounged about awaiting supper, with drinks, conversation, a game of chess, a game of go, a few clustered at the grand piano in a corner, from which danced a Chopin scherzo.

Agents of similar backgrounds tended to visit the same decades of the lodge’s long existence. However, the pianist tonight was born in the thirty-second century Anno Domini, in orbit around Saturn. Patrol people did feel curious about other eras than their own, and sometimes they got enchanted by some aspect of one.

Everard and Tamberly draped their mackinaws over their arms. She went around saying goodbye. He lingered near the pianist. “Will you stay on here?” she asked him in Temporal.

“A few days, I think,” he answered.

“Good. I too.” The topaz gaze dropped. The hairless alabaster-white head—not albino; a healthy product of genetic technology—bent again above the keys. “If you desire your heart eased, I have the Gift of Quietness.”

“I know. Thanks.” He didn’t expect he’d want more than some rambles by himself, but the offer was generous.

Tamberly returned to him. He accompanied her to her room. While he waited in the corridor, she changed into clothes she had brought, suitable for the San Francisco area, summer’of 1989, and packed her other stuff. They went down to the underground garage. Hoppers stood row on row, like wheelless futuristic motorcycles, beneath bleak white light. At the one assigned her, she stowed her luggage.

Turning about, “Well, au revoir, Manse,” she said. “New York HQ, noon, Thursday the tenth of April, 1987, agreed?” They had settled on it in a few awkward words.

“Agreed. I’ll, uh, I’ll have tickets to The Phantom of the Opera. Take care.”

“And you, buster.” She came to him. The kiss was long and became hungry.

He stepped back. Breathing hard, a little rumpled, she swung into the saddle, smiled, waved, touched controls. She and her vehicle blinked out of sight. He paid no heed to the usual snap of air rushing in where they had been.

A minute or two he stood alone. She’d spoken of a three-month hitch in the field after her trip home, before their intended holiday. He didn’t know how long it would be for him. That depended on what he’d be doing. He had no immediate call, but something was certain, when the Patrol must keep order in the traffic across a million years of time, with what was really a bare scattering of agents.

Abruptly he laughed aloud at himself. After—however much lifespan it was—traipsing through the continuum, was he finally over the hill? Second childhood, no, second adolescence. He saw that he’d felt as if he were sixteen again, and it made no sense. He’d fallen in love often enough before. A few times he’d done nothing about it, because to go ahead would have brought more harm than good. This might be such a case. Probably was, God damn it. Maybe not. He’d find out. They would, bit by bit, together, and either get serious and make whatever sacrifices proved necessary or else part as friends. Meanwhile—He started to go.

Another noise, of a different kind, passed softly behind him. He knew that difference. He halted, looked around, and saw a vehicle newly arrived. The person aboard was about seven feet tall and spidery long-limbed but, in a close-fitting leatherlike coverall, clearly female. Her hair, drawn into a crest as if on a helmet, shone Asian blue-black, but no Mongoloid skin was so deep a yellow, and the eyes were enormous and the same faded blue as his, while the face was narrow and hook-nosed. He didn’t recognize the race at all. Her origin must be very far futureward.

Temporal fell harsh from incongruously full lips. “Unattached Agent Komozino,” she identified herself. “Quick, tell me, are any of my rank at these coordinates?”

It stabbed in him: Trouble. She knew more, and probably had a better brain, than he did. Army habits from the Second World War, almost forgotten, brought him half to attention. “Me,” he clipped. “Manson Emmert Everard.”

“Good.” She got off and approached him. Through the tight control in her voice he heard the tension, the dread. “What data I could access indicated you might be. Listen, Manson Emmert Everard. We have had a catastrophe, some kind of temporal upheaval. As nearly as I have been able to ascertain, it occurred approximately on Julian day 2,137,000. Beyond that, events diverge. No Patrol stations appear to exist. We must rally whatever forces we have left.”

She stopped and waited. She knows what a hammerblow she’s dealt me, trickled down the back of his mind. I’ll need a minute to catch my balance.

The astronomical number she’d spoken—Somewhen during the European Middle Ages? He’d calculate exactly, no, he’d ask her. Wanda was bound for twentieth-century California. “Now” she won’t come out into anything of the kind. And she isn’t trained for such a situation. None of us are—our job is to prevent it—but to her it’ll be no more than vaguely remembered classroom theory. She’ll be stunned worse than I am. My God, what’ll she do?

II

The dining room in the lodge accommodated all guests and staff, though chairs around tables got a bit crowded. Light came silver-gray and uneasy through the windows, for clouds swept low before a wind whose booming went as an undertone, the sound of autumn on its way south. Everard knew he imagined, but he felt as if a breath of the cold outside seeped inward.

More did he feel the gazes upon him. He stood at the far end, beneath a vigorous mural of bison that a local artist had painted some fifty years ago. Komozino was at his side, impassive. She had told him he had better take the lead. He was much closer in birthtime, memories, ways of thinking, to everybody else. Moreover, behind him lay a relevant experience unique among them.

“We spent most of the night talking, when we weren’t shuttling message tubes in hopes of more contacts and information,” he said into the appalled silence that followed his announcement. “So far, we know very little. There’s reason to think the key event is in Italy, mid-twelfth century. At least, the Patrol has a man then at Palermo, island of Sicily. He got word that the king there was killed in battle on the mainland. It was not supposed to happen. His database says the king lived on for nearly twenty years and was important. Like a sensible fellow, our man sent a tube a short way uptime to his milieu headquarters. It returned, informing him that that office was gone, spurlos versenkt, never founded. He called other stations contemporary to himself, and they checked their own futures—very cautiously, of course, not venturing more than a couple of decades ahead. No new Patrol agencies anywhere. As you’d expect, otherwise the scenes weren’t strange. They wouldn’t be—yet—except perhaps in southern Europe. The effects of a change propagate across the world at varying speeds, depending on factors like distance, ease of travel, and closeness of relations between countries. The Far East might begin to be touched, slightly, pretty soon; but the Americas may well go on unaffected for centuries, Australia and Polynesia longer still. Even in Europe, at first the differences are probably mainly political. And … that’s a whole new political history, about which we here know nothing.

“Anyhow, naturally, our bases in the twelfth century started communicating with those downtime. This led to contact with Unattached Agent Komozino.” Everard gestured at her. “She happened to be in Egypt—uh, Eighteenth Dynasty, did you say?—tracking down an expedition from her home millennium that’d gone back in search of cultural inspiration and evidently gotten lost…. No, plain to see whatever became of it, there was no noticeable effect on history…. She took charge of the entire emergency operation, pending the availability of more people with the same rank. A data scan suggested me, so she came in person to inform and confer.” Everard braced himself. “At the moment, unless a Danellian shows up, we, ladies and gentlemen, are on the edge of the effort to salvage the future.”

“Us?” cried a young man. Everard knew him peripherally, French, period of Louis XIV and assigned to that same milieu, as most agents were assigned to their own eras. It meant he was bright. The Patrol got few recruits from before the First Industrial Revolution, and very few from prescientific societies. A person who hadn’t been raised in that style of thinking was seldom able to assimilate the concepts. At that, this lad was having difficulties. “But, sir, there must be hundreds, thousands of our kind active before the crisis date. Shall we not gather them all together?”

Everard shook his head. “No. We’re in deep enough trouble already. The vortices we could generate—”

“Perhaps I can make it a little clearer,” Komozino offered crisply. “Yes, quite probably most Patrol personnel go into the pre-medieval past, if only on vacation, like you. They are present, so to speak, there and then. Often more than once. For example, Agent Everard has been active in settings as diverse as early Phoenicia, Achaémenid Persia, post-Roman Britain, and viking Scandinavia. He has repeatedly come to this lodge for rest and recreation, at various points of its existence, both downtime and uptime of the present moment. Why should we not call on these Everards also? Certainly two Unattached make an insufficient cadre of leaders.

“The fact is, we have not done so. We will not do so. If we did, that would change reality again and again, hopelessly, beyond any possibility of comprehension, let alone control. No, if we survive what is ahead of us and prevail over this misfortune, we will not double back on our world lines and warn ourselves to beware. Never! If you try it, you will find that your conditioning against such antics is as powerful as your conditioning against revealing to any unauthorized person that time travel occurs.

“The mission of the Patrol is precisely to maintain the ordered progression of history, of cause and effect, human will and human action. Often this is tragic, and the temptation to intervene is almost overwhelming. It must be resisted. That way lies chaos.

“And if we are to execute our duty, we must constrain ourselves to operate in as linearly causational a fashion as possible. We must always remember that every paradox is more than mortally dangerous.

“Therefore I have been flitting about, seeing to it that the news does not reach most of our remaining personnel. It is best confined to a few indispensables, and to selected off-duty individuals like yourselves. To further disturb the normal pattern of events is to risk obliteration and oblivion.”

Her stiff height sagged a little. “It has been hard,” she whispered. Everard wondered how much of her lifespan she had spent on that frantic task. It wasn’t just a matter of dashing from post to post, passing on the word here and hushing it up there. She had to know what she was doing. Mostly she must have been immersed in records, databases, evaluations of people and periods. The decisions must frequently be agonizing. Had she been at it weeks, months, years? Awed, he knew that such an intellectual achievement was altogether beyond him.

He had his own strengths, though. He took the word: “Remember too, friends, the Patrol does more than guard the integrity of time. That’s a job for special officers, and crucial though it is, it doesn’t occupy the main part of our activity. Most of us are police, with the traditional tasks of police.” We give advice, we regulate traffic, we arrest evildoers, we help travelers in distress, now and then we provide a shoulder to cry on. “Our fellow agents are busy. If we took them off their jobs, all hell would break loose.” Actually. Temporal lacked an exact equivalent of the homely English phrase in his mind. “So we’ll leave them alone, okay?”

“How shall we do that?” asked a twenty-first-century Nubian.

“We need a headquarters,” Everard said. “This’ll be it. We can seal it off for a certain limited slice of time without affecting anything else too much. That’d be impossible at the Academy, for instance. We’ll bring in people and equipment, and operate mainly out of this base. Just what we do—well, first we have to learn exactly what the situation is, then figure out our strategy. Sit tight for a few days.”

A smile, if it was a smile, twisted Komozino’s lips. “It is either grotesque or it is appropriate that Agent Everard is involved and that he shall commence out of here,” she remarked.

“May one request enlightenment as to the significance of the memsahib’s statement?” inquired a babu from the British Raj.

Komozino glanced at Everard. He scowled, shrugged, and said heavily, “It might possibly help, now, if you know. I was caught up in something like this earlier along my world line. A friend and I were staying here. Several years later than today, on the resort’s calendar. You’re aware how complicated the bookings get for as popular a spot as this. No matter. We decided to finish our furlough in my home, twentieth-century New York, and hopped there. It was totally foreign. Eventually we found out that Carthage had beaten Rome in the Punic Wars.” A gasp went around the room. Some persons half rose to their feet, sank down again and shivered. “What happened?” he heard, over and over.

Everard skipped dangers and deeds. The whole thing still hurt too much. “We went back well pastward, organized a force, and mounted an expedition to the critical point, a certain battle. We found a couple of outlaw time travelers, with energy weapons, on the Carthaginian side. Their idea was to make a godlike place for themselves in the ancient world. We nailed them before they could perform the action that counted, and … again history went the way it ought to, the way we remembered because we were born in it.” I condemned a world, uncounted billions of perfectly decent human beings, to nullity. They never were. None of what I had experienced ever happened. The scars on my spirit are simply there; nothing caused them.

“But I haven’t heard of this before, me!” protested the Frenchman.

“Certainly not,” Everard answered. “We don’t advertise stuff like that.”

“You saved my life, sir, my existence.”

“Thanks, but spare the gratitude. It isn’t called for. I did what I had to do.”

A Chinese, once a cosmonaut, narrowed his eyes and asked slowly, “Were you and your friend the only travelers who went uptime into that undesired universe?”

“By no means,” Everard replied. “Most skited straight back. Some didn’t; they never reported in anywhere; we can only guess they got trapped, maybe killed. My friend and I had a stiff time escaping. It happens that, out of those who returned, we were the ones able to take charge and organize the salvage operation—which happened to be a fairly simple one, or we could not have handled it, at least not without calling in more help. When it was complete, why, that post-Carthaginian world had never existed. People returning futureward from the past ‘always’ found the same world as ‘always.’”

“But you remember differently!”

“Like others who’d seen the changed world, and those Patrol folk who hadn’t but whom we co-opted. What the bunch of us had experienced, what we had done, couldn’t be erased in us, or we’d never have done it.”

“You spoke of persons who entered the alternate future but failed to get away from it. What became of them when it was … abolished?”

Everard’s nails bit into his palms. “They no longer existed either,” he said like a machine.

“Apparently only a relative few entered it, including you. Why not many? After all, in the course of the ages—”

“Those were just the ones who happened to cross the crucial moment, bound uptime, in that larger section of time during which there were related events, like the Patrol’s salvage work. We’ve got a longer section now, with a lot more traffic in it, so our problem is correspondingly bigger. I hope you understand what I’m saying. I don’t.”

“It requires a metalanguage and metalogic accessible to few intellects,” Komozino said. Her tone sharpened. “We haven’t time to quibble about theory. The span in which we can use this base without seriously perturbing things is limited. So is the number of personnel, therefore the total lifespan at our disposal. We must make optimum use of our resources.”

“How?” challenged the woman from Saturn.

“For openers,” Everard told them, “I’m going up to the milieu of that king and learn whatever I can. It’s the sort of job that wants an Unattached agent.”

And meanwhile, except that “meanwhile” is meaningless, Wanda’s caught in yonder alien future. She must be. Else why hasn’t she come back to me? Where else would she flee to, if she was able?

“Surely that Carthaginian world has not been the sole invasive reality,” said the babu.

“I suppose not. I haven’t been informed of any more, but—I’ve no need to know. Why risk an extra change? It might not damp out; it might bring on a new temporal vortex. And as a matter of fact,” Everard flung at him, “we’re faced with another reality right now.”

Again because of deliberate tampering? The Neldorians, the Exaltationists, lesser organizations and individuals, crazed or greedy or—whatever they are—The Patrol’s coped with them. Sometimes just barely. How did we fail against this enemy? Who is it? How to lay him low?

The hunter awoke in Everard. A chill tingle passed through his spine, out to scalp and fingertips. For a blessed moment he could set pain aside and think of pursuit, capture, revenge.

1989 α A. D.

Fog banked in the west caught early morning light and dazzled the blue overhead with whiteness. It was beginning to break up in tatters and streamers before a low, cold breeze off the unseen ocean. Leaves rustled on toyon. Not far away, a stand of cypress glowed darkly green. Two ravens croaked and flapped from a solitary live oak.

Wanda Tamberly’s first reaction was mere astonishment. Why, whatever has happened? Where’ve I come out? How? She caught a breath, looked around, saw nothing human. Relief washed through her. For half an instant she’d feared that somehow Don Luis—But no, that was absurd, the Patrol had shipped the Conquistador back to his proper century. Besides, this wasn’t Peru. Below the timecycle she recognized yerba buena, even sensed a hint of the fragrance crushed from it by the weight. The plant gave its name to that settlement later called San Francisco—

Her pulse went from quickstep to sprint. “Cool it, gal,” she whispered, and brought her gaze to the instruments between the handlebars. Their projected displays gave the date, local standard time, latitude, longitude, yes, precisely what she’d set for, down to the fractional second, except that seconds of time flowed from her as she stared…. Simulated crosshairs on a simulated map also declared her position. Finger shaking a little, she summoned a full-scale vicinity chart. The center of the street grid was where it ought to be, at that secondhand bookshop in the Cow Hollow district which fronted for the Patrol’s station.

And yonder rose Nob Hill and Russian Hill. Or did they? She knew them covered with buildings, not brush. In the opposite direction, a glimpse of Twin Peaks seemed familiar; but what had become of the television tower? Of everything? She hadn’t appeared in a subterranean garage but on the surface, surrounded by solitude.

Instinct stormed awake. She kicked the power pedal and flung her machine aloft. Air brawled by the force-screen. At once she knew she’d panicked. She grabbed self-control, halted, and hovered on antigrav two thousand feet high. Her ears had popped. They hurt. That helped make things real for her, no fever dream but a mess to cope with.

Is this foolish, hanging in sight of God and radar? Well, nobody to see me, is there? Nobody at all, at all.

No San Francisco, no Treasure Island, no Golden Gate or Bay Bridge, no Eastbay cities, no ships or aircraft, nothing save the wind and the world. Across the strait, Marin County hills hulked summer-brown, as did the range behind an Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, Richmond that didn’t exist either. Ocean was slivers of silver to west and north on the far side of the shifting blue shadows in the fog. At the inland edge of mist she saw part of the sand dunes where Golden Gate Park ought to be.

Like before the white man came. A few Indian camps here and there, I suppose. Could the temporal part of this hopper have developed a collywobble, and I landed pastward of the twentieth century? Never heard of any such thing, but neither have I ever heard of any high tech that was not highly temperamental. Like a calming hand laid upon her, the knowledge came that the Time Patrol had operatives someplace at every moment of a million years or more.

She activated her communicator. The radio bands were silent. Wind shrilled, stronger at this altitude than below. She felt how cold she was. Her clothing was blouse, slacks, sandals. This vehicle wasn’t equipped for the fancier sorts of transmission, like neutrino modulation, but the Patrol used radio freely in eras before Marconi, or was it before Hertz or Clerk Maxwell or who? Maybe nobody happened to be sending. “Hello, hello, Specialist Wanda Tamberly calling…. Come in, please come in ….” Shouldn’t there be a set of beacons for her to home on? Could she be too distant from any to receive? That didn’t figure, when even the scientists of her milieu detected signals of a few watts across the Solar System. But she was no transistor tripper.

Jim Erskine was. He could make electrons dance a fandango. They’d gone together for a while, students at Stanford. If Jim were here—But she’d put such people behind her forever when she joined the Patrol. Her folks too, all blood kin except Uncle Steve; oh, she visited, she lied about her wonderful job that kept her so much on the go; nevertheless—Loneliness smote like the wind.

“Better get someplace warm and take stock,” she muttered. “Especially if the someplace serves hot buttered rum.” However feeble, the jape encouraged her. She sent the machine slanting downward across the Bay.

Pelican and cormorant winged in their thousands. Sea lions basked along island shores. On the eastern side she found shelter in a redwood grove, majesty through whose shade sunlight cast golden spatters, a brook purled, fish swam and leaped. Desolation is relative, she thought.

Dismounting, she kicked off her sandals and did a few minutes’ stationary jogging on the soft duff. Warmed, she opened the luggage carrier behind the buddy seat to check what her assets were.

Damn skimpy. Standard emergency stuff, helmet, stun pistol, isotopic battery, flashlight, glowlight, water bottle, food bars, small tool kit, small medical kit. A bag holding the few changes of clothes, toothbrush, comb, et cetera that she’d brought with her to the resort; generally she’d worn garments kept in stock for guests. A purse, with the usual late-twentieth-century American female clutter. A couple of books she’d read at odd moments. Like most of those agents who operated away from their birth milieus and didn’t maintain lodgings there, she had a locker at the local station where she kept necessary stuff, including money. Her plan had been to pick up what she wanted and taxi to her parents’ home, since it chanced they couldn’t conveniently meet her at the airport. Had they been able to, a more elaborate deception would have been required.

Oh, Dad, Mother, Susie. Yes, and the cats too.

Slowly, the serenity around her smoothed down despair. The thing to do, she decided, was not to try springing straight back to the Pleistocene—though God damn, wouldn’t it be good to see Manse there, big and solid and able?—or flicker blindly through time in this neighborhood. If she couldn’t trust the temporal drive, her best bet was to head spatially east. Maybe she’d find European colonies yonder, or maybe she’d have to continue overseas, but eventually she was bound to make a Patrol contact.

She donned her old jacket from backpacking trips that abruptly felt very remote, and laced stout shoes over socks on her feet. Helmet secured to head, pistol to hip, she was as ready for trouble as she’d ever be. Remounting, she steered her hopper out among the huge trunks and into the sky.

Green bordered the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers; elsewhere tawniness passed beneath her, no trace of irrigation, agriculture, highways, towns. Impatience prickled. This jet plane speed was too flinking slow. She could go supersonic, but that was still a crawl and would be extravagant of energy reserves she might need later. For several minutes she mustered nerve, then set the space controls and gingerly touched the button.

The Sierra peaks lay below her, the desert beyond, and the sun stood as much higher as she gauged it ought. So she could safely bypass distance. “Yippee!”

Proceed by jumps—An illimitable grassy plain shimmered under the wind. Thunderheads towered in the south. The radio remained mute.

Tamberly bit her lip. This wasn’t right. She spent a while skipping above the prairies. Bird life was rich, but the land reached strangely empty. She spied a herd of wild horses before at last she came above some buffalo. Their abundance should have darkened the ground for miles….

Smoke rose from the right bank of the Missouri. She hovered far up, activated her optical, and magnified. Yes, people, and they kept horses, yet this was a village of sod huts, tilled fields outside the stockade….

Shouldn’t be! Once they became riders, the plains Indians turned almost overnight into warriors and nomadic hunters, living off the buffalo till white men slaughtered those, also almost overnight. Had she chanced on some such moment of transition as, say, 1880? No, because then she’d have seen spoor of the whites everywhere, railroads, towns, ranches, farms laid out in homesteaders’ quarter sections….

Remembrance struck. The horse barbarians weren’t in any balance with nature either. If they’d been left alone, they’d have wiped out the buffalo themselves, slower but just as surely.

No. Please, no. Don’t let this be.

Tamberly fled on eastward.

1137 A. D.

Going from Ice Age France to medieval Sicily by way of Germany earlier that same year did not strike Everard as funny until he chanced to think about it. His chuckle clanked. Time travel was like that, including what it did to people’s minds, the stuff they came to take for granted.

The fact was that the contemporary base in Palermo was a one-man operation. Its front was a shop which, with the live-in family and staff, filled its only building. There was no subterranean addition. The likelihood of you and your vehicle popping out of thin air, being seen and exciting comment, was prohibitive. Patrol facilities were to be expanded later, starting in 1140, when Norman Sicily really began to gain importance. But this didn’t happen, because King Roger II died in battle and the future that led to the Patrol was aborted.

Mainz had long been a major city of the Holy Roman Empire, and so headquarters for that milieu were there. At the moment the realm was a loose, often turbulent confederation across what a twentieth-century man would regard as, approximately, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, pieces of northern Italy and the Balkans. Everard recalled Voltaire’s wisecrack that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. However, in the twelfth century it was perhaps a bit less undeserving of the name.

On the day Everard arrived, Emperor Lothair was in Italy with an army, helping press his claims and those of Pope Innocent against the claims of Roger and Pope Anacletus. Turmoil would follow his death, until Frederick Barbarossa finally won full control. Meanwhile the main action would be in Rome, to which milieu HQ was to shift in 1198—except that it wouldn’t, it hadn’t, because no Patrol ever existed to establish that office.

Today, though, Mainz could provide what Everard needed.

Upstairs from the garage he found the director. They retired to a private office. It was a room of handsomely carved wainscots, well-furnished by standards of the period; there were actually two chairs, as well as stools and a small table. A leaded window admitted some light. More came in from another, unglazed, its shutters open to the summer day. Through it rumbled, groaned, creaked, clopped, chattered, whistled, buzzed the noises of the city. Through it also drifted the odors of hearths, horse manure, privies, and graveyards. Across a narrow, filthy, bustling street Everard saw a beautiful half-timbered fagade; beyond its roof, cathedral towers rose in majesty.

“Welcome, Herr Freiagent, welcome.” Otto Koch waved at a carafe and beakers on the table. “Would you care for a little wine? A good year.” He was German himself—born 1891, studying medieval history when called into the army of the Second Reich in 1914, recruited by the Patrol while adrift in bitterness and bewilderment after that war. The years here-now had given him a comfortable, middle-aged look, a bit paunchy in his fur-trimmed robe. It was deceptive. You didn’t keep a post like his without being plenty competent.

“Thanks, but not at once,” Everard replied. “Can I sneak a smoke?”

“Tobacco? Oh, yes. Nobody will disturb us.” Koch laughed and pointed. “That bowl is my ashtray. People know I burn a rare Oriental wood in it when I want to smother the municipal stinks. A rich merchant can afford such luxuries.” From a humidor disguised as a saint’s image he took a cigar and lighter. Everard declined the one he was offered. “I’ll stay with my old friend, if you don’t mind.” He hauled forth briar pipe and pouch. “Uh, I don’t suppose you can indulge often.”

“No, sir. Difficult enough to handle my proper work. My public persona takes up most of my time, you realize. The requirements of the guild, the Church—Ah, well.” Koch lit up and settled happily into his chair. No need to worry about ill effects. Patrol immunizations, which did not employ the vaccine principle, prevented cancer and arteriosclerosis, along with the infectious diseases that came and went through the ages. “What can we do for you?”

Turning grim, Everard explained.

Horror stared at him. “What? This very year a, a cancellation? But that is—unheard of.”

“Unheard of by you. And you will keep it strictly secret, understand?”

The habits of disguise took over. Koch crossed himself, again and again. Or maybe he was a sincere Catholic.

“Don’t be afraid.” Everard spoke deliberately.

The anger he provoked flushed out dismay. “It is natural that one fears for one’s workers, comrades, yes, the family I have in this era.”

“None of you will disappear at the critical moment. What will happen is that you stop receiving visitors from the future, and no new posts are started up after this year.”

The enormity grew and grew before Koch. He sagged back. “The future,” he whispered. “My childhood, parents, brothers, everybody I loved at home—I cannot now go see them again? I did. They believe I moved to America but make a few return visits, until Hitler comes to power and I stay away—They did believe.” He had fallen into twentieth-century German. No language but Temporal had the grammar to cope with time travel.

“You can help me restore what we’ve all lost,” Everard said.

Koch rallied admirably fast. “Very good. We shall. Forgive my ignorance. It is long ago in my lifespan that I studied the theory at the Academy, and that was only superficially, because this thing is not supposed to happen, is it? The Patrol guards against it. What has gone wrong?”

“That’s what I hope to find out.”

Provided with appropriate garb, Everard was introduced around as a trader from England. It accounted for any gaucheries. Nobody had seen him come in the door, but this was a large, busy household-shop, and butlers were for royalty. Folk seldom encountered him anyway during his three-day stay. They gathered that he and the master closeted themselves to discuss confidential matters. The growth of cities in size, wealth, and power was providing untold commercial opportunities.

The hidden section of Mainz HQ possessed an ample database and machinery for putting information directly into brains. Everard acquired a thorough knowledge of recent and current events. No human memory could have contained the details of laws and mores, as wildly as they varied from place to place, but he learned enough that he probably wouldn’t make disastrous mistakes. He added to his stock of languages. Medieval Latin and Greek he already had. German, French, and Italian were still sets of dialects, not always mutually comprehensible. He gained sufficient to get by. Arabic he decided against; any Saracens with whom he might deal would almost certainly know lingua franca, at least.

He also made his plans and preparations. He intended first to seek the Patrolman in Palermo, shortly after the news of Roger’s fall, to confer and get a feel for the milieu. There was no substitute for direct experience. That meant he must enter the city inconspicuously and plausibly. Yet he had damn well better have force in reserve.

Besides his own strength and skills, the force consisted of an officer detached from regular duty. Karel Novak found himself on the run from his Czechoslovakian government in 1950. He was mightily glad when an acquaintance hid him, persuaded him to take some curious tests, and turned out to be a Patrol recruiting agent who’d had an eye on this young fellow. Novak served at several different locales “before” being posted to imperial Mainz. He was the straightforward policeman type who dealt directly with time travelers, counselor, helper, now and then restraining somebody from a forbidden action or rescuing somebody from a bad situation. His public persona was a general-purpose servant of Master Otto, gofer, arranger, bodyguard on the road. He was well informed about the environs, of course, but needn’t be expert, since he was admittedly from the backwoods of Bohemia. The tale of how he came this far, when most commoners weren’t supposed to move around, was plausible, mendacious, and usually good for a drink or two in a tavern. He was a dark-haired, squat, powerful man with narrow eyes in a broad face.

“Are you certain we should not tell others than him what this is all about?” Koch asked when he and Everard said their private goodbye.

The American shook his head. “Not unless a clear need for somebody to know comes up. I tell you, we’ve got trouble in carload lots without creating unnecessary sub-effects. Those could have consequences of their own that might get out of hand. So you will not drop any hint to your associates, or to any traveler who comes by in the normal course of affairs.”

“You say that soon none will.”

“Not from the future, most likely. A few may have reason to jump here from somewhere else in the present or the past.”

“But you tell me visits will dwindle till we have none. My people are bound to notice and wonder.”

“Stall them. Listen, if we resolve this and restore the proper course of history, the hiatus will never have happened. As far as Patrollers stationed here are concerned, everything will always have been normal.” Or what passes for normal along the twisting time lanes.

“But I will have had quite a different experience.”

“Up until the turning-point moment, sometime later this year. Then, if we’re lucky, an agent will come and tell you it’s all okay. You won’t remember anything you did thenceforth, because ‘now’ you won’t do those things. Instead, you’ll simply proceed with your life and work as you did before today.”

“You mean that while I am in the wrong world, I must know that everything I do and see and think will become nothing?”

“If we succeed. I know, the prospect for you isn’t quite pleasant, but it’s not really like death. We count on your sense of duty.”

“Oh, I will carry on as best I can, but—Brr!”

“We may fail,” Everard warned. “In that case, you’ll join the other survivors of the Patrol when they meet to decide what to do.” Will I be there myself? Very possibly not. Killed in action. I almost hope so. It’ll be a nightmare world for our sort.

He thrust away memories of his own that no longer referred to anything real. He mustn’t think about Wanda, either. “I’m on my way,” he said. “Good luck to us both.”

“God be with us,” Koch replied low. They shook hands.

I’ll skip any prayers. I’m too bewildered already.

Everard met Novak in the garage and took the rear saddle of a hopper. The Czech had been studying a geographical display on the control board. He set destination coordinates and activated.

1137 α A. D.

Immediately the vehicle poised on antigravity, high aloft. Stars gleamed, a brilliant horde such as you rarely saw in the late twentieth century. The circle of the world below was divided between sheening water and a rugged land mass full of darknesses. The air lay cold and quiet, not a motor anywhere on Earth.

Novak set his optical for light amplification and magnification and peered downward. “Quite deserted, sir,” he deemed. He had already scouted ahead and found this site.

Everard studied it likewise. It was a ravine in one of the mountains that formed a semicircle behind the narrow plain around the bay on which Palermo stood. Terrain in the vicinity was steep, rocky, nurturing only scrub growth, therefore doubtless left alone by shepherds and hunters. “You’ll wait here?” he inquired needlessly.

“Yes, sir, until I get further orders.” It was equally needless to say that Novak would duck elsewhere to eat and sleep, returning within minutes, and would disappear should he notice anybody headed his way in spite of the uninviting surroundings. He’d be back as soon as possible.

“Good soldier.” Who does what he’s told and keeps any inconvenient questions behind his teeth. “First bring me to the highway. Fly low. I want to know how to find you in case I have to.”

That would be if, for some reason, he couldn’t use his communicator. It was housed in what looked like a religious medallion hung around his neck under his clothes. The range ought to be adequate, but you never knew. (You dared not foreknow.) Novak was well-armed, in addition to the stun pistol that every cycle had in its luggage box. Everard, though, couldn’t be, without risking trouble with the local authorities. At least, he couldn’t overtly be. He did carry a knife like most men, a utensil for eating and odd jobs; a staff; and a variety of martial skills. Anything more might make somebody too curious.

The cycle flitted a couple of yards above the mountainside, presently above goat trails and footpaths, till it reached the flatlands and rose to avoid a peasant village. Dogs might take alarm and wake sleepers. Without artificial light to choke off night vision, people saw astonishingly well after dark. Everard fixed landmarks firmly in his mind. Novak glided back down to hover above the coast road. “Let me advance you to dawn, sir,” he suggested. “There is an inn, the Cock and Bull, two kilometers west. Whoever spies you ought to suppose you spent the night there and set off early.”

Everard whistled. “That name’s too eerily appropriate.”

“Sir?”

“Never mind.”

Novak touched his controls. The east went pale. Everard sprang to the ground. “Good hunting, sir,” Novak bade.

“Thanks. Auf Wiedersehen.” Machine and rider vanished. Everard set off in the direction of sunrise.

The road was dirt, rough with ruts and holes, but winter rains had not yet: turned it into a mire. When day broke, he saw that a hint of green had begun to relieve the dustiness of plowlands, the tawniness of mountains. At a distance, to his left and ahead, shimmered the sea. After a while he made out a few sails, tiny upon it. Mariners generally fared by day, hugging coasts, and eschewed voyages of any length this late in the year. However, along Sicily you were never far from a safe harbor, and the Normans had cleared these waters of pirates.

The countryside appeared prosperous, too. Houses and sheds clustered in the middle of fields cultivated by their tenants, cottages mostly of rammed earth below thatch roofs but well made, gaily decorated upon their whitewash. Orchards were everywhere, olive, fig, citrus, chestnut, apple, even date palms planted by the Saracens when they held this island. He passed a couple of parish churches and glimpsed, afar, massive buildings that must be a monastery, perhaps an abbey.

As time and miles fell behind him, more and more traffic came onto the road. Mainly the people were peasants, men in smock coats and narrow trousers, women in coarse gowns hemmed well above their footgear, children in whatever, burdens on heads or shoulders or diminutive donkeys. They were mostly short, dark, vivacious, descended from aboriginal tribes, Phoenician and Greek colonists, Roman and Moorish conquerors, more recently and casually traders or warriors out of mainland Italy, Normandy, the south of France, Iberia. Doubtless many, perhaps the majority, were serfs, but nobody acted abused. They chattered, gesticulated, laughed, exploded into indignation and profanity, grew as quickly cheerful again. Others mingled, peddlers making their rounds, the occasional priest or monk telling his beads, individuals less identifiable.

News of the king’s death had not dampened spirits. Possibly most hadn’t yet heard. In any case, such personages and such events were as a rule remote, nearly unreal, to folk who seldom went more than a day’s walk from wherever they were born. History was something to be endured, war, piracy, plague, taxes, tribute, forced labor, lives shattered without warning or meaning.

The common man in the twentieth century was more widely, if more shallowly, aware of his world; but did he have any more say in his fate?

Everard strode amidst a bow wave and wake of attention. At home he stood big; here he loomed, and wholly foreign. His garments were of ordinary cut and material for a wayfarer or townsman, tunic falling halfway to the knees above hose, cap trailing a long tail down his back, knife and purse at the belt, stout shoes, colors fairly subdued; but they were not quite of any regional style. In his right hand swung a staff; on his left shoulder hung a bundle of small possessions. He’d skipped shaving, beards being usual, and sported a respectable growth; but his stiff brown hair wouldn’t soon reach below his ears.

People stared and commented. Some hailed him. He replied affably, in a thick accent, without slackening his pace. Nobody tried to detain him. That might not be safe. Besides, he seemed legitimate, a stranger who’d landed at Marsala or Trapani and was bound east on some errand, very likely a pilgrimage. One saw quite a few such.

The sun climbed. More and more, farms gave way to estates. Across their walls he glimpsed terraces., gardens, fountains, mansions like those their builders had also raised in North Africa. Servants appeared, many of them black, a number of them eunuchs, attired in flowing robes, often sporting turbans. Real estate might have changed hands, but the new owners, like the Crusaders in the East, had soon fallen into the ways of the old.

Everard stood aside, head uncovered, when a Norman lord went by on a bedizened stallion. The man wore European clothes, but gaudily embroidered, a golden chain around his neck and rings aglitter on both hands. His lady—astride a palfrey, skirts hiked up but leggings preserving modesty—was as flamboyant and as haughty. Behind rode a couple of body servants and four guards.

Those were still purely Norman men-at-arms, stocky, tough, noseguards on their conical helmets, chain mail hauberks polished and oiled, straight swords at hips, kite-shaped shields at horses’ flanks.

Later a Saracen gentleman passed with his own train. This group wasn’t armed, but in a subtler fashion it was at least as sumptuous. Unlike William in England, the Normans here had given generous terms to their defeated opponents. Although rural Muslims became serfs, most in the cities kept their property and paid taxes that were reasonable. They continued to live under their own laws, administered by their own judges. Except that their muezzins could only call publicly to prayer once a year, they were free to practice their religion as well as their trades. Their learning was eagerly sought and several held high positions at court. Others provided the shock troops of the army. Arabic words were permeating the language; “admiral,” for instance, traces back to “amir.”

The Greek population, Orthodox Christian, enjoyed a similar tolerance. So did the Jews. Townsmen dwelt side by side, swapped goods and ideas, formed partnerships, embarked on ventures in the confidence that any gains would remain theirs. The result was material wealth and cultural brilliance, a Renaissance in miniature, the embryo of a whole new civilization.

It wouldn’t last more than half a dozen generations all told, but its legacy would pervade the future. Or so the Patrol’s databanks related. However, they also declared that King Roger II would live another two decades, during which Sicily reached its finest flowering. Now Roger lay in whatever grave his enemies had seen fit to give him.

Palermo drew in sight. The most splendid of its buildings did not yet grace it, but already it shone and soared behind its walls. More domes, often gorgeous with mosaic or giltwork, lifted skyward than did Catholic spires. Entering unquestioned through a gate guarded but open, Everard found streets crowded, noisy, kaleidoscopically alive—and cleaner, better smelling, than any he had trod elsewhere in medieval Europe. Though sailing season was over, craft lay close together around that inlet from the bay which in this era was the harbor: high-castled merchantmen, lateen riggers, war galleys, types from end to end of the Mediterranean and from the North. They weren’t all idled for the winter. Business went brisk, raucous, in and out of warehouses and chandleries, as it did at booths and shops everywhere.

Following the map he had learned, the Patrolman made his way through the crowds. That wasn’t easy. He had the size and strength to force a passage but not the temperament, which most locals did. Besides, he didn’t want trouble. But damn, he was hungry and thirsty! The sun had gone low above the western range, shadows welled upward in the lanes, he’d tramped many miles.

A laden camel squeezed between walls. Slaves bore the litters of a man who was presumably a big wheel in his guild and a woman who was presumably an expensive courtesan. Several housewives gossiped, homebound from market, baskets on their heads, small children clinging to their skirts, a baby at one breast. A Jewish rug seller, cross-legged in his stall, ceased crying his wares and made obeisance as a rabbi passed grave and gray-bearded, accompanied by two young scholars who carried books. Greek voices resounded lustily from a hole-in-the-wall tavern. A Saracen potter had stopped the wheel in his little shop and prostrated himself, evidently guessing this was one of the five times for prayer. A burly artisan carried his tools. Before each church, beggars implored the layfolk who went in and out; they didn’t pester the clergy. In a square a young man played a harp and sang while half a dozen others listened. They pitched coins at his feet. He wasn’t actually a troubadour, Everard supposed, but he sang in the langue d’oc of Provence and must have learned his art there, the homeland of his audience. By now French and Italian immigrants outnumbered the original Normans, whose own blood was fast being diluted.

Everard slogged on.

His destination lay in Al-Qasr, near the nine-gated interior wall surrounding that district of markets and souks. Passing by the great Friday Mosque, he reached a Moorish house converted to a place of business. As was usual, the owner and his people also lived there. The door stood open on a large chamber. Within, silks were displayed on tables at the front. Many of the bolts and pieces were marvels of needlework. Toward the rear, apprentices trimmed, sewed, folded. They didn’t hasten. Medieval man generally worked a long day but at a leisurely pace; and he enjoyed more free time, in the form of frequent holidays, than his twentieth-century descendants.

Eyes lifted toward the huge newcomer. “I seek Master Geoffrey of Jovigny,” Everard announced in Norman French.

A short, sandy-haired person who wore a richly decorated robe advanced. “I am he. How may I serve you”—his voice stumbled—“good sir?”

“I have need to speak with you alone,” Everard said.

Volstrup caught on at once. He’d received a message from downtime telling him to expect an agent. “Certainly. Follow me, if you please.”

Upstairs, in the room with the cabinet that doubled as a computer and communicator, Everard admitted he was ravenous. Volstrup stepped out for a minute and returned promising refreshment. His wife brought it herself, a tray loaded with bread, goat cheese, olive oil, cured fish, dried figs and dates, wine, water to cut it. When she had left, the Patrolman attacked it like a Crusader. Meanwhile he told his host what had been going on.

“I see,” murmured Volstrup. “What do you plan to do next?”

“That depends on what I learn here,” Everard replied. “I want to spend a little while getting familiar with this period. You’re doubtless so used to it that you don’t realize how handicapping it is not to know all the nuances that somehow never get into the databases—the jarring little surprises—”

Volstrup smiled. “Oh, but I well remember my early days. No matter how I had studied and trained beforehand, when I entered this country it was shockingly alien.”

“You’ve obviously adapted well.”

“I had the backing and help of the Patrol, of course. I could never have established myself solo.”

“As I recall, you arrived as a man from Normandy, a younger son of a merchant, who wanted to start up his own business and had some capital from an inheritance. Right?”

Volstrup nodded. “Yes. But the intricacies, the organizations I must deal with, official, ecclesiastical, private—and then the folkways. I thought that from my youth I had known much about the Middle Ages. I was wrong. I had never experienced them.”

“That’s the usual reaction.” Everard was taking his time, getting acquainted, putting the other man at ease. It would expedite operations later. “You’re from nineteenth-century Denmark, is that it?”

“Born in Copenhagen in 1864.” Everard had already noted, in the half-intuitive way one senses personalities, that Volstrup was not the Epicurean Dane common in the twentieth century. His manner was formal, a bit stiff; he gave an impression of primness. Yet the psych tests must have shown adventure in his blood, or the Patrol would never have invited him in. “I grew restless during my student days and took two years free, roaming about Europe as an itinerant worker. It was an accepted thing to do. Returning, I resumed my studies, which concentrated on the history of the Normans. I had no thought, no hope of anything more than a professorship somewhere. Then, shortly after taking my master’s degree, I was recruited.” Volstrup shivered. “But I am not important. What has happened, that is.”

“How did you get interested in this period?”

Volstrup smiled again while he shrugged. “Romanticism. Mine was the late Romantic era in the North, you know. And the Scandinavians who originally settled in Normandy, they were not Norwegians, as the Heimskringla claims. Personal and place names show they came, at least for the most part, from Denmark. After which they proceeded to fight and conquer from the British Isles to the Holy Land.”

“I see.” For a silent minute, Everard ran the facts through his head.

Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger, together with other kin, reached southern Italy in the previous century. Countrymen of theirs were already on hand, fighters against both Saracens and Byzantines. The land was in turmoil. A leader of warriors, who joined one of the factions, might come to grief when it did, or he might do very well for himself. Robert ended as Count and Duke of Apulia. Roger I became Grand Count of Sicily, with a firmer hold than that on his own territory. It helped that he had obtained a papal bull making him apostolic legate of the island; that gave him considerable power within the Church.

Roger died in 1101. His older legitimate sons were dead before him. Thus he left the title to eight-year-old Simon, child of his last wife, half-Italian Adelaide. She, as regent, crushed a baronial revolt and, when sickness also took Simon off, handed an undiminished authority over to her younger son, Roger II. He took full mastery in 1122, and set about regaining southern Italy for the house of Hauteville. Those conquests had fallen away after Robert Guiscard’s death. The claim was resisted by Pope Honorius II, who did not care for a strong, ambitious lord as the immediate neighbor of the papal territories; by Roger’s rival relatives, Robert II of Capua and Rainulf of Avellino, Roger’s brother-in-law; and by the mainland people, among whom there stirred ideas of city autonomy and republican government.

Pope Honorius actually preached a crusade against Roger. He must needs retract it when the army of Normans, Saracens, and Greeks from Sicily prevailed over the coalition. By the end of 1129, Naples, Capua, and the rest recognized Roger as their duke.

To nail down his position, he needed the name of king. Honorius died early in 1130. Not for the first or last time, the medieval intermingling of religious and secular politics brought about the election of two claimants to the throne of St. Peter. Roger backed Anacletus. Innocent fled to France. Anacletus paid off his debt with a bull proclaiming Roger king of Sicily.

War followed. Innocent’s great clerical partisan, Bernard of Clairvaux, whom the future would know as St. Bernard, denounced the “half-heathen king.” Louis VI of France, Henry I of England, and Lothair of the Holy Roman Empire supported Innocent. Led by Rainulf, southern Italy revolted anew. Strife went back and forth across that land.

By 1134, Roger seemed to be getting on top. The prospect of a powerful Norman realm alarmed even the Greek emperor in Constantinople, who lent his aid, as did the city-states Pisa and Genoa. In February 1137 Lothair moved south with his Germans and with Innocent. Rainulf and the rebels joined them. Following a victorious campaign, in August he and the Pope invested Rainulf as Duke of Apulia. The emperor started home.

Indomitable, Roger came back. He sacked Capua and forced Naples to acknowledge him lord. Then, at the end of October, he met Rainulf at Rignano….

“You’ve settled in pretty well, I see,” Everard remarked.

“I have learned to like it here,” Volstrup answered quietly. “Not everything, no. Much is gruesome. But then, that is true in every age, not so? Looking uptime after all these years, I see how many were the horrors to which we Victorians smugly closed our eyes. These are wonderful people, in their fashion. I have a good wife, fine children.” Pain crossed his face. He could never confide in them. He must in the end watch them grow old and die—at best; something worse might get them first. A Patrolman did not look into his own future or the futures of those he loved. “It is fascinating to watch the development. I will see the golden age of Norman Sicily.” He stopped, swallowed, and finished: “If we can correct the disaster.”

“Right.” Everard guessed that now going straight to business would be kindest. “Have you gotten any word since your first report?”

“Yes. I have not yet passed it on, because it is very incomplete. Better to assemble a coherent picture first, I assume.” As a matter of fact, it was not, but Everard didn’t press the point. “I never expected an … Unattached agent … so soon.”

Volstrup straightened where he sat and forced firmness into his voice: “A band of Roger’s men who escaped from the battlefield made their way to Reggio, got a boat across the strait, and continued here. Their officer has reported at the palace. I have my paid listeners among the servants there, of course. The story is that Rainulf’s total victory, the slaying of the king and prince, was due to a young knight from Anagni, one Lorenzo de Conti. But this is mere hearsay, you understand. It is gossip that reached them after the fact, in fragments, as they straggled homeward through a country in upheaval, full of people who hated their kind. It may be worthless.”

Everard rubbed his furry chin. “Well, it needs looking into,” he said slowly. “Something that specific ought to have some truth behind it. I’ll want to sound out the officer. You can fix that up for me, can’t you, in a plausible way? And then, if it seems this Lorenzo fellow may be the key to it all—” Again the hunter’s tingle went through his skin and along his backbone. “Then I’ll try to zero in on him.”

1138 α A. D.

To Anagni on its high hill, some forty miles from Rome, came a rider one crisp autumn day. Folk stared, for horse and man were uncommonly large; bearing sword and shield though at present unarmored, he was clearly of rank; a baggage mule followed on a tether; yet he fared alone. The guards at the city gate to which he came answered respectfully when he drew up and hailed them in rough Tuscan. Advised by them, he passed through and wound his way to a decent inn. There he got his gear unloaded and his beasts stabled and fed, while he took a pot of ale and a gab with the landlord. He was affable in a gusty German fashion and readily learned whatever he wanted to know. Presently he gave a coin to one of the boys and bade him carry a message to the right place: “Sir Manfred von Einbeck of Saxony sends his respects to Sir Lorenzo de Conti, the hero of Rignano, and would fain call upon him.”

They brewed a grand local beer at Einbeck in those nineteenth and twentieth centuries that Manse Everard remembered. He needed a little whimsy to keep him going, keep him from too much silent crying out to his ghosts.

The title he used, Italian “Signor,” German “Herr,” bore a less definite meaning than it would later, when the institutions and orders of chivalry had fully developed. However, it bespoke a fighting man of good birth, and that sufficed. Eventually, on the Continent, it would merely signify “Mister”—or would it, in the strange world uptime?

The boy sped back with an invitation to come at once, Outsiders were always welcome for the news they could convey. Everard changed into a robe, which a Patrol technician had judiciously given the wear and tear of travel, and accompanied his guide on foot. The streets were cleaner than most because a recent rain had washed their steepness. Narrow between walls and overhanging upper stories, they were filling with gloom, but in a strip of sky he glimpsed evening light ruddy-gold on the cathedral that reared at the summit of the hill.

His destination was lower down but near where the Palazzo Civico stood forth from the hillside on arches. The Conti and Gaetani were the chief families in Anagni, which had gained importance during the past several generations. This house was large, its limestone little marked as yet by time, which would at last obliterate it. A fine colonnade and glass in the windows relieved its ruggedness. Servants in blue-and-yellow livery, all Italians, all Christian, reminded Everard how far from Sicily he had come, in spirit if not in miles or years. A footman took over, conducting him through halls and chambers rather sparsely outfitted. Lorenzo was a younger son, rich only in honors, still unmarried, staying here because he could not afford Rome. Decayed though the great city was, landowning nobility in the backward, agricultural papal territories preferred to inhabit fortress-like mansions there, visiting their rural properties occasionally.

Lorenzo was in a two-room suite at the back, easier to keep warm than the larger spaces. Everard’s first sense when he entered was of vividness. Even quietly seated, the man somehow blazed. He rose from his bench as a panther might. Expression went across his face like sun-flickers on water where a breeze blew. That countenance was sharply, almost classically sculptured, with big eyes whose gold-brown-russet seemed as changeable instant by instant; it appeared older than his twenty-four years, yet also ageless. Wavy black hair fell to his shoulders. Beard and mustaches were trimmed to points. He was tall for the era, slim but broad-shouldered. His garb was not the usual robe of a gentleman indoors, but blouse, tunic, hose, as if he wanted always to be ready for action.

Everard introduced himself. “Welcome, sir, in the name of Christ and this house.” Lorenzo’s baritone rang. “You honor us.”

“The honor is mine, sir, thanks to your graciousness,” Everard responded, equally polite.

A smile flashed. Teeth that good were a rarity nowadays. “Let’s be frank, shall we? I itch for talk about faring and fighting. Do you not? Come, make yourself easy.”

A buxom young woman, who had been holding her hands near the charcoal brazier that somewhat staved off chill, took Everard’s cloak and poured wine, undiluted, from a pitcher into goblets on a table. Sweetmeats and shelled nuts had been set forth too. At a gesture from Lorenzo, she genuflected, bobbing her head, and retired to the adjacent room. Everard noticed a crib there. The door closed behind her.

“She must remain,” Lorenzo explained. “The infant is not well.” Plainly she was his current mistress, no doubt a peasant girl of the neighborhood, and they had had a baby. Everard nodded without expressing hope for its quick recovery. That was a poor bet. Men didn’t invest much love in a child till it had survived the first year or two.

They sat down, across the table from each other. Daylight was waning, but three brass lamps served vision. By their shadowful glow, the warriors in a fresco behind Lorenzo—a scene from the Iliad, or maybe the Aeneid, Everard guessed—came half alive. “You have been on pilgrimage, I see,” Lorenzo said. Everard had taken care to display a palmer’s cross.

“To the Holy Land, for my sins,” the Patrolman told him.

Eagerness leaped: “And how fares the kingdom? We hear ill tidings.”

“The Christians hold on.” They would for another forty-nine years, till Saladin retook Jerusalem … unless that part of history was also gone awry. A torrent of questions rushed over Everard. He’d briefed himself pretty thoroughly, but had trouble with some, as shrewd as they were. In several cases, where he couldn’t well admit ignorance, he invented plausible answers.

“Body of Christ, could I be there!” Lorenzo exclaimed. “Well, someday, God willing. I’ve a mort to do first, nearer home.”

“Everywhere I stopped, on my way up through Italy, I heard how mightily you’ve wrought,” Everard said. “Last year—”

Lorenzo’s hand chopped air. “God and St. George aid our cause. We’ve well-nigh finished driving the Sicilians out. This new King Alfonso of theirs is a bold rogue, but lacks his father’s cunning and skill. We’ll chase him onto his island soon, I vow, and finish the crusade. But for the moment there’s scant action. Duke Rainulf wants to make sure of his hold on Apulia, Campania, and what we’ve won of Calabria before he proceeds farther. So I’ve returned, and been yawning till my jaws ache. Man, it’s good to meet you! Tell me about—”

Perforce, Everard related the adventures of Sir Manfred. The wine, which was excellent, smoothed his tongue, soothed his impatience, and conferred inventiveness as to details. Having duly visited the sacred places, bathed in the Jordan, et cetera, Manfred had gotten in a little fighting against the Saracens, a little boozing and wenching, prior to embarkation for his homeward voyage. The ship landed him at Brindisi, whence he continued on horseback. One servant had succumbed to illness, another in a skirmish with bandits; for King Roger’s ruthless warfare, year by year, had left much desolation and desperate men were many.

“Ah, we’ll clean them out,” Lorenzo said. “I thought of spending the winter in the South, scouring for them, but travelers are few that time of year, the outlaws will withdraw into whatever wretched dens are theirs, and … I am not fain to play hangman, however necessary the task be. Go on with your tale, I pray you.”

Nobody else had molested Sir Manfred, which was understandable considering his size. He planned to visit the shrines of Rome and there engage new attendants. Anagni was hardly out of his way, and he had longed to meet the illustrious Sir Lorenzo de Conti, whose exploit last year at Rignano—

“Alas, my friend, I fear you will come back to evil,” sighed the Italian. “Do not cross the Alps without strong escort.”

“I have heard somewhat. Can you give me fuller news?” was natural for Sir Manfred to say.

“I suppose you know that our valiant ally, the Emperor Lothair, died in December while homebound,” Lorenzo explained. “Well, the succession is disputed, and factional strife has led to open war. I fear the Empire will be troubled for a long time to come.”

Till Frederick Barbarossa at last restores order, Everard knew. If history runs the same course that far uptime.

Lorenzo brightened. “Yet as you’ve seen, the cause of righteousness is prevailing without its help,” he went on. “Now that the blasphemous devil Roger is fallen, his realm crumbles before us like a sand castle under a rainstorm. I take it for a sign of God’s grace that his eldest son and namesake perished with him. He would have been almost as able an enemy. Alfonso, the successor they got—well, I’ve spoken of him.”

“Ah, that became a famous day,” Everard attempted, “and you carried it. How I have thirsted to hear the tale of it from your very lips.”

Lorenzo smiled but rushed ahead on the tide of his enthusiasm: “Rainulf, I told you, is making the southern duchies his own; nobody else counts for much any longer in those parts. And Rainulf is a true son of the Church, loyal to the Holy Father. This January—have you heard?—the false Pope Anacletus died, leaving none to dispute Innocent’s right.” In my history, Roger II got a new anti-Pope elected, but that one abdicated within a few months. However, Roger had the personal and political strength to keep on defying Innocent, and eventually took him prisoner. In this history, Alfonso was unable to field even a feeble rival. “The new Sicilian king does continue to claim the apostolic legateship, but Innocent has denounced that mistaken bull and preached a fresh crusade against the house of Hauteville. We’ll cast it into the sea and bring the island back to Christ!”

To the Inquisition, when it gets founded. To the persecution of Jews, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians. To the burning of heretics.

And nonetheless Lorenzo came across as a decent sort by the standards of his epoch. Wine had set him aflame. He sprang to his feet, paced to and fro, gestured wildly, spoke in trumpet tones.

“Then we’ve our brother Christians in Spain to aid, driving the last Moors from their soil. We’ve the Kingdom of Jerusalem to fortify for eternity. Roger was gaining a foothold in Africa; already those conquests are falling away, but we’ll get them back, and more. That too was once a Christian land, you know. It shall be again. There is the heretic emperor in Constantinople to humble, the true Church to restore for his people. Oh, boundless glory to win! I own to it, sinful I, my lust for a name like—let me not dare say Alexander’s or Caesar’s—like Roland’s, the first of Charlemagne’s paladins. But of course it’s the reward in Heaven we must think of, the infinite reward for faithful service. I know that isn’t won merely on the battlefield. All around us are the poor, the afflicted, they who mourn and they who are oppressed. They shall have comfort, justice, peace. Only give me the power to bestow their due on them.”

He leaned down, clasped Everard’s shoulders, said almost imploringly, “Abide with us, Manfred! I can well judge might in a man. Yours must be the strength of ten. Go not back to your hopeless home. Not yet. You’re a Saxon. So you surely hold by your duke, who holds by the cause of the Pope. You can better aid it here. Charlemagne sprang from your country, Manfred. Let us stand ready to be knights of a new Charlemagne!”

As a matter of fact, Everard recalled, he was a Frank, who massacred the Old Saxons with Stalin-like thoroughness. But the Carolingian myth has taken hold. The Chanson de Roland won’t be composed for a while yet, the romances not till later still. However, popular stories and ballads are already in circulation. Lorenzo would be bound to seize on them. I’m dealing with a romantic, a dreamer—who’s also a warrior as formidable as they come. Dangerous combination. I can almost see a nimbus of destiny around that head.

The thought hauled the Patrolman back to his purpose. “Well, we can talk about it,” he said cautiously. Given his bulk, he felt the wine much less, just a glow in his veins which the tightly trained mind kept channeled. “I do wish to hear of your deeds.”

Lorenzo laughed. “Oh, you shall, you shall. My pridefulness is the despair of my confessor.” He took another turn around the room. “Stay. Sup with us this eventide.” That would be a light repast, soon served. The main meal was at midday, and given the poor illumination, people rarely sat up much past nightfall. “You’ve no business at a lousy inn. What must you think of my hospitality? A bed here shall you have, for as long as you wish, beginning at once. I’ll send boys after your animals and baggage.” With his elders at Rome, he was obviously in charge. Flinging himself back onto his bench, he reached for his beaker. “Tomorrow I’ll take you hawking. We can talk freely then, out in the wind.”

“I look forward, and thank you greatly.” A tingle went through Everard. This looks like the moment to try my luck. “I have heard extraordinary things. Especially about Rignano. They say a saint appeared to you. They say that only by a miracle could you have charged through the foe as you did.”

“Ha, they say whatever comes onto their tongues,” Lorenzo snorted. “Commoners’ gabble.” Quickly: “Not but what God alone gave us our victory, and I’ve no doubt St. George and my patron watched over me. I’ve lighted many candles to them, and when I’ve won the means, I intend to endow an abbey at least.”

Everard stiffened. “But nobody saw … anything supernatural … upon that day?” That’s how medieveal people would look on a time traveler and his works.

Lorenzo shook his head. “No. Not I, and I’ve heard no such claims from anyone else who matters. True, it’s easy to get confused in a fight, outright delirious; but your own experience must have taught you to discount that.”

“Nothing remarkable earlier, either?”

Lorenzo gave Everard a puzzled glance. “No. If Roger’s Saracens were attempting witchcraft, the will of God thwarted them. What makes you ask so intently?”

“Rumors,” Everard mumbled. “You understand, being a pilgrim, I’m especially interested in any signs from Heaven—or from hell.” He rallied himself, tossed off a mouthful, and managed a grin. “Mainly, though, as a soldier, I’m interested in what did happen there. It was no ordinary battle.”

“It was not. In truth, I felt the hand of God upon me when first I lowered lance and spurred horse toward the prince’s standard.” Lorenzo crossed himself. “Otherwise everything was of this world, tumult and turmoil, hardly a moment free for awareness, let alone any real thinking. Tomorrow I’ll be glad to relate what my memory keeps of it.” He smiled. “Not now. The story has grown stale in our household. Indeed, I myself would rather dwell on what we’ll do next.”